At the Equinox Gallery until December 12

If we were to identify a few senior figures in Canadian culture as national treasures, Gathie Falk would be high among them. The Things in My Head, a mini-retrospective at the Equinox Gallery, attests to this Vancouver artist’s enduring accomplishment, energy, and vision. It also highlights recurring themes, images, and motifs through selective juxtapositions of new work and old. Still-life paintings from 1962, at the beginning of Falk’s career, converse with those created in 2009 and 2015. Wooden cases of ceramic men’s shoes from 1970 take part in a dialogue with a row of men’s shirts, newly created out of polymerized gypsum. And a video projection of Falk’s 1972 performance Red Angel calls out, in an unsettling way, to her 2011 papier-mâché sculpture The Problem With Wedding Veils.

The show also demonstrates the richly multivalent nature of Falk’s practice, not only in medium but in style. Her art consolidates a number of art movements, from naturalism to surrealism, and from expressionism to pop.

Although initially it seems odd that many of the works on display in this commercial gallery are not offered for sale (they’ve been borrowed from private collectors who clearly want them back after the show), the strategy is ultimately a shrewd one. The show honours Falk’s long and prolific career, reminds us of powerful thematic continuities, and, frankly, tantalizes us. And the installation, overseen by Equinox director Andy Sylvester, is inspired. For instance, the two major exhibition spaces, on either side of the entrance hall, demonstrate different yet complementary aspects of Falk’s art-making. In their vibrant colours and glossy glazes, the fruit piles in the west gallery are luscious and life-affirming, while the many black or white sculptures of clothing in the east gallery function as ghostly markers of absent individuals.

I’ve written before about Falk’s use of clothing as a metaphor for the human body. Her sculpted dresses and men’s shirts probe aspects of gendered identity, yes, but at the same time, I’ve observed, they register a number of oppositions, including presence and absence, corporeality and spirituality, love and loss. Again, the black patina of the bronze sculptures, such as Reclining Figure (After Henry Moore), and the subtly inflected white acrylic paint of the papier-mâché works, such as Dress With Boy, amplify the spectral nature of these forms. And Falk’s new oil painting, Andy’s Suit, which depicts a man’s jacket, shirt, and tie posed as if on an invisible being, is as spooky (but also as humorous) as the legend of the Headless Horseman.

Despite all their sensuous beauty and voluptuousness, the piles of ceramic apples, oranges, and grapefruit are also haunted by death and decay. In our ancient past, pyramids were royal tombs or temples of bloody sacrifice. Their shape and mass symbolize sacred mountains where heaven and earth meet, where human beings commune with the divine and petition the gods for a place in the afterlife. Along with Falk’s much-acclaimed sourcing of forms and images from prosaic experience (the series of ceramic-fruit piles was inspired by corner-grocery displays), the cycle of life and death is also evoked. In 196 Apples, the hues of the fruit shift moodily downward, from brilliant cadmium red to magenta shaded with charcoal grey.

Throughout Falk’s work, even the cheeriest subjects—picnics, baskets of cherries and plums, a silvery canoe adorned with coloured ribbons and floating in the air like a celestial body—seem to meditate on the ways mortality informs the bountiful everyday. And in Arsenal, her recent piles of bronze snowballs, powder-coated in brilliant white, the suggestion is of weapons, of piles of cannonballs, and of the way children’s games foretell adult aggression—war, murder, and destruction. Still, Falk’s devotion to and keen observation of her subjects invest them with the promise of rebirth.

This is a dazzling show—smartly curated, brilliantly installed, and a fitting tribute to one of our most treasured artists.