Doors (3 Demolition)

Long-time Chicagoan and Hyde Park resident, Gertrude Abercrombie painted in a Surrealist manner, explaining:

"Surrealism is meant for me because I am a pretty realistic person but don't like all I see. So I dream that it is changed. Then I change it to the way I want it. It is almost always pretty real. Only mystery and fantasy have been added. Only foolishness has been taken out. It becomes my own dream."

In this painting Abercrombie responded imaginatively to the urban renewal that began in Hyde Park in the 1950s. Her doors dominate the painting's composition, isolated from their original construction site. Resonating mysteriously in a dark, barren urban landscape devoid of atmosphere, weather, or time of day, they act as a device that cuts off the view and symbolically communicates the artist's own life-long internal struggles with isolation and loneliness. That Abercrombie had spent the happiest days of her life in a building destroyed by gentrification gives personal weight to the subject.