Gertrude Abercrombie

Biography

With her enigmatic portraits, landscapes, and paintings of interiors, Gertrude Abercrombie added a distinctly American, female voice to the heavily European, male Surrealist movement. She plumbed the psychic geography of her native Midwest, combining the aesthetic tendencies of artists such as Salvador Dalí and René Magritte with a focus on rural spaces. Abercrombie was born in Texas, grew up in Illinois, and briefly studied at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She was employed by the Works Progress Administration’s Federal Art Project and exhibited widely in Chicago and New York. Abercrombie’s work is included in the collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art, Art Institute of Chicago, Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, and Smithsonian American Art Museum.