The feeling arrived as a sense of wanting to get away. Then I thought I was too hot, my frequent complaint, never voiced, that the sunlight in LA is too bright and loud. For over an hour I passed, back and forth, in front of the five tapestries and two drawings that comprised Christina Forrer’s self-titled show at Parker Gallery, uncomfortable in my body. The textiles were hung against a wallpaper of Forrer’s bright, disorienting drawings; everything was so colorful and busy that it could, on first glance, be mistaken for cheerful and warm, some high-art retread of the mid-aughts affection for pop illustration. But I looked closer—hard to do with Forrer’s massive work—and the nausea set in.
Eventually I left in a kind of torpor. Only after I made it to a second location, hunched over a lunch I’d delayed too long, could I then name my primary reaction to Forrer’s work: It grossed me out.
It’s not often that I see something that evokes an immediate and visceral sensation of disgust. As the parent of a toddler, I deal with plenty of excretions; as a subject under late capitalism and an American under the current administration, no shortage of aesthetics, acts, policies, and cultural drifts make me queasy. But disgust itself—its single, pure note—is unique enough of an experience to actually provoke a kind of confusion, a struggling-to-name. I wanted to look away from Forrer’s art. I experienced the sensation that there was too much of it, that I needed to remove myself from the gallery because I could not remove the art from it. As I made myself look, my queasiness began to dissolve into anxiety. Forrer’s work hammers a chord that is difficult for me, at least, to endure—the sound of a warning, of a call coming from inside the house. It’s as if she has made pictures of the drifting inner sense that something is wrong, some memory incorrect, some exit missing.
Christina Forrer, Cave, 2025, cotton and wool. Courtesy Parker Gallery, Los Angeles. Photo: Paul Salveson.
The Swiss-born, Los Angeles–based Forrer is known for her large-format textiles, prodigiously produced, featuring massive faces woven in lurid neons among bisected houses where the trappings of domesticity loom, unsettling and loud. Fairy tales are Forrer’s explicit inspiration, and they are often invoked when describing her work; so, too, is therapy. The habit of likening Forrer’s work to stories and insights from childhood dodges her oeuvre’s significant darkness and unknowability, defaulting to toothless statements that avoid the inexplicable churn of Forrer’s tapestries. “Fantastic events transform a twisting narrative,” writes independent curator Robert Cozzolino of Forrer’s work, “one that might seem grim and macabre but carries a lesson about integrity and faith.” Does it?
The exhibition brought to mind fairy tales that float in obvious revolt against happily ever after: Darcey Steinke’s 1997 novel Jesus Saves, a landmark text in my reading history, particularly with its cover art by Rita Ackermann, an image of a bikinied girl posed like the Virgin Mary with a unicorn tattooed on her forehead; and Kij Johnson’s story “Ponies,” accompanied by a Chris Buzelli illustration of a pink, weeping unicorn, blood gushing from the hole where her horn once was. But while these stories allegorize on themes like the price of conformity, Forrer is not so directive. She has the frustrating habit of just making you look.
There are no ponies in Forrer’s tapestries, but there is a magic cave (in Cave, 2025), a mother-daughter centaur pair (in Mother / Daughter, 2025), and in every tapestry, an animal with a tiny, alarmed face. In Cave, a tapestry inspired by a recovered Bavarian fairy tale, an elderly woman stands exhausted, her body unyielding in its labor. Her walking stick is no weapon against an overpowering cave, surrounded by dizzying, sinister emanations, nor the massive hand inside, reaching for her. In my least favorite work (or perhaps most favorite), Guy on a Swing (2025) we are treated to the side rear view of a man’s ass, his fingers outstretched to the pink backside of some kind of dog that is also a girl, his head being consumed by a small, voracious figure who might be emerging from it—or descending into it.
Christina Forrer, Guy on a Swing, 2025, cotton and wool. Courtesy Parker Gallery, Los Angeles. Photo: Paul Salveson.
What about this tapestry bothered me so much? The face of the titular guy is cartoony and knowable, as if he is a relative of one of the seven dwarves. The thrust of his ass, in a literal state of suspension on a swing, mirrors the hindquarters of the girl-dog, suggesting some equalizing force between the two of them. But they are not equal. The guy is clearly an adult, the girl-dog a child. His face suggests a sluggish desire for connection, hers the “fawn” response triggered in trauma survivors by the presence of a threat.
There is a sense, in the time-world of Forrer’s images, of everything occurring at once; in the drawing Thumbelina (2025), that story (or something like it) is told by a left-to-right assemblage of many-headed figures, their different, adjacent faces showing the passage of plot. Manic flowers loom and a giant catlike head oversees the story, fearsomely involved. The people in Forrer’s drawings and tapestries are never alone, but rather than comforting, this constant company struck me as a performative sociality. The presence of others thrusts Forrer’s individuals into the insidious stew of community. Seeing the intensity and tension of the images, I couldn’t help thinking that the figures in her work might like some privacy, but no matter what walls might separate them from others, they are never granted true solitude. This uncomfortable togetherness, along with the scale of Forrer’s work, recalls The Unicorn Tapestries, which she frequently cites as an inspiration. Those tapestries, displayed at the Met Cloisters in New York, portray a festive gathering in which a creature revered for its purity will be slaughtered. Interpreted as an allegory for Christ and for marriage, their purpose, origin, and ownership remain a mystery more than five centuries after their creation. The provenance of Forrer’s work is not lost to us; it is its defiant, grandiose energy that confounds while daring interpretation.
Christina Forrer, Thumbelina, 2025, ink and pencil on paper. Courtesy Parker Gallery, Los Angeles. Photos: Paul Salveson.
Forrer’s knack for including intricately wrought kitsch patterns on the wall hangings and tablecloths that appear in her domestic scenes suggests a claustrophobic inevitability to the effect of the home on the life one leads outside of it. In Patterns (2025) and Cutaway (2024), miasmic coils unfurl from the intersections of beings—a wave of ochre connecting one figure’s mouth to the red stove range, to the figure seated across the table, and to the orange floor lamp against the back wall. These prismatic paths seemingly lead to the consequences of actions taken and untaken. In Training Tables (2025), there are fewer coils, but the inside appears turned out, with people stuck in the interstices, damaging and being damaged by the connectivity that emanates from the home, as in Patterns, where shapes that might be waves of sound from the pipe the central figure plays cloy like more insidious and inescapable emotional traces. All of the tapestries in the show, save for Cave, portray interior spaces, the fraught realm of the domestic, in which trauma and danger copresent with familiarity and comfort. In these families, people emit steam and churn with scent as do kettles and ambiguously edible food.
Cave is explicitly connected, in Parker Gallery’s press release, to the Bavarian fairy tale “The Turnip Princess.” In the tapestry, the old woman, her head bent, her body covered with a floral-print housedress, approaches the psychedelic ovaloid with the massive hand inside—the titular cave. The story was recorded by the nineteenth-century German historian Franz Xaver von Schönwerth and then forgotten in an archive until the early 2010s. It embraces the brutal, dreamlike logic of tales in which the final outcome is always marriage, often acquired by means of a sharp object—in this case a nail, which is driven into, and removed from, various surfaces and objects before dissolving into flame.
Christina Forrer, Cutaway, 2024, cotton and wool. Courtesy Parker Gallery, Los Angeles. Photo: Paul Salveson.
It is hard, and perhaps wholly unnecessary, to justify one’s reactions. For me, Forrer’s massive, relentless peeks brought with them a bright smell of mothballs, a disorientation in the space of the gallery, and the desire to leave, very quickly. Of her working relationship with her mentor, the Kurdish American master weaver Babajan Lazar, Forrer has said, “I would go and show him what I have made, and he would tell me, like, ‘This sucks.’ … That really made it more fun, because, finally, someone is telling you your stuff sucks.” She also says, “When you are weaving something, you don’t see the whole thing; you see [a small portion] of a gigantic thing.” A gleaming enthusiasm for the difficult, disorienting, and confounding floats in these statements, as if, in her art-making practice, Forrer may be both the fly and the child wielding the magnifying glass to burn it.
Even many days after viewing the exhibition, I’m left with the inability to articulate why the seemingly happy affect of Mother / Daughter reminded me immediately of the Johnson story, in which a little girl brings her pony to a party where it is trampled to death. I can only gesture at the shared feeling that I perceive between the two works, that same sensation of unease seems to vibrate around the Forrer show as a whole. I have metabolized it, brought it into my body, where it now lives uncomfortably within me. I feel intimate with the sensation. It seems to have come from within me—from within the deep psychedelic cave of the self. I think—I have decided—that perhaps my discomfort is the point.
