Christina Forrer at Parker Gallery

Christina Forrer, Training Tables (2025). Cotton and wool, 42 3/4 x 98 inches. Image courtesy of the artist and Parker Gallery. Photo: Paul Salveson.

Christina Forrer’s self-titled exhibition at Parker Gallery includes tapestries, wallpapers, and works on paper that are disorienting but deeply familiar, like dreaming in someone else’s childhood home. Drawing on folk and fairy-tale logics, where transformations abound and domestic space becomes a site of magic, Forrer’s tapestries open like cutaway diagrams of the psyche. Houses split open throughout the frayed cotton and wool, whose soft surfaces and psychedelic patterns tremble with the pressure of intimate desires and relationships. Windows, bedrooms, and staircases recur, but what they contain feels volatile. Forrer presents these interiors as zones of transformation where selfhood is negotiated, at once playful and disconcerting. 

Training Tables (2025) dramatizes how private impulses can be so powerful they distort physical space. In the work, the walls of a house have been sliced away to reveal exposed interiors, a visual grammar borrowed from dollhouses and architectural cross-sections. Yet the spatial logic implied by the structure breaks down almost immediately. A giant head presses in from upstairs, dwarfing the rooms it surveys. It fixates greedily on an apple, as if embodying the outsize force of an unwanted or intrusive desire. 

Such distortions call to mind psychoanalyst D. W. Winnicott’s understanding of “transitional space,”¹ where inner life and external reality overlap. It is the place where the psyche projects itself outward, playing and testing its dramas in the world such that the self and the other blurs. Indeed, in Cutaway (2024), two figures gather at a dining table, and vaporous streams bloom from their mouths before meeting mid-air, carrying the intensity of their interaction into the rest of the house. The domestic interior is leaky, channeling psychic drama as though it were a river system, currents spilling into every room.  

If Forrer’s houses swell and compress under the pressures of inner life, Cave (2025) turns outward. Drawing on the Bavarian fairy tale The Turnip Princess, Forrer depicts the cursed old woman hunching at the mouth of an enchanted cavern. Inside, a massive hand reaches toward her, haloed by radiant multicolored blasts. Unlike the home, which absorbs and projects psychic turbulence, the cave opens up to an elsewhere, a threshold one must cross in order to be remade.

The exhibition suggests that the boundaries between interior life and inhabited spaces are thinner than imagined. Domestic interiors, usually cast as sites of refuge, appear instead as congested and mutable, transformed by forces of desire and connection. Yet Cave illustrates another register of change, wherein Forrer proposes a double truth of psychic life: our homes absorb and circulate psychic turbulence, but metamorphosis often demands a breach of their built boundaries.

Christina Forrer runs from September 12-November 1, 2025 at Parker Gallery (6700 Melrose Ave, Los Angeles, 90038).

Christina Forrer, Cutaway (2024). Cotton and wool, 96 3/4 x 76 inches. Image courtesy of the artist and Parker Gallery. Photo: Paul Salveson.

Christina Forrer, Patterns (2025). Cotton and wool, 103 x 71 inches. Image courtesy of the artist and Parker Gallery. Photo: Paul Salveson.

Isabella Miller lives and works in Los Angeles.

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