The next artist you need to know is Polly Apfelbaum.
She is an installation and mixed media artist. Apfelbaum’s most recognizable and significant works are the pieces she refers to as “fallen paintings” : these vibrantly colourful floor works challenge the supposed ‘definitions’ that separate painting and sculpture, and installation. She “often works through pieces of dyed fabric arranged on the floor to give the impression that abstract paintings have fallen off the walls and arranged themselves on the floor. Although noted for her playfulness and wit, Apfelbaum also tackles more weighty subjects, such as feminism and popular culture.” (from Artnet)
“Fabric can never be totally controlled and is never the same. It has a mind of its own and is open to chance. I have always felt like an in-between artist, working in the space between painting and sculpture, between narrative and abstraction, between form and color, control and chance, beauty and not beauty.”
The images below are of the installation These Boots Are Made for Walkin (Frith Street Gallery, London, England, March 24 – May 5, 2023).
Apfelbaum was born in 1955 in Pennsylvania but relocated to NYC in 1978, where she has resided ever since. She has a BFA from the Tyler School of Art in Elkins Park, Pennsylvania (1978) and also attended SUNY Purchase College in New York. Her first one person show was in 1986 and Apfelbaum has been exhibiting both in the United States and internationally at a steady level ever since.
She has been showing her work consistently in the United States and internationally since her first one-person show in 1986 but her career truly began to flourish in the 1990s.
In speaking about her work in 1992, Apfelbaum offered the following :
“Three terms that are important to me:
Suppleness: a non-rigid formal language, the softness of crushed velvet, the liquidity of fabric. Things piled up, draped, lying on the floor, leaning against the wall. Serial and variable arrangements (as opposed to orthogonal, erect, vertical, and fixed.)
The domestic (the everyday): …the realm of repetition, reiteration, and routine. That which does not declare itself to be a work of art first of all.
Wonder (beauty): to begin to wonder at the subversive and critical possibilities of the beautitful, the excessive, the fantastic”
The images below document her massive installation Face (Geometry)( Naked) Eyes, 2016, as it was installed at Ben Maltz Gallery, OTIS College of Arts and Design, Los Angeles, CA, September 24th – December 4th, 2016.
She’s earned a number of awards throughout her multi decade career. Notable ones include an Academy Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters (2002), Joseph H. Hazen Rome Prize (2012 – 2013), a Joan Mitchell Grant, a Richard Diebenkorn Fellowship, a Guggenheim Fellowship (1993), an Artist’s Fellowship from the New York Foundation for the Arts and the Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant.
The images below are of Apfelbaum’s installation Dubuffet’s Feet My Hands, 2016 – 2017 (Frith Street Gallery, London, 24 November 2017–2 February 2018) with details of the ‘hands’ along the walls.
A massive exhibition of her work was mounted in 2003 : this travelling mid – career survey of Apfelbaum’s artworks began at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia before continuing on (into 2004) to the Contemporary Arts Center in Cincinnati, OH, and the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art in Kansas City, MO. The Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia also produced an impressive catalogue that focused on the previous 15 years of the artist’s practice.
A more detailed listing of her exhibitions can be seen here.
Apfelbaum’s artworks can be found in many private and public collections, including The Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and the Dallas Museum of Art.
A more complete listing of her accomplishments can be seen here.
Much more about her art and ideas can be enjoyed at her site here. A number of the works featured there have installation shots (as well as links to short videos) that offer a more genuine impression of Apfelbaum’s installations and the sheer physical nature of her work.
‘The idea is to make the work rich enough, dense enough, or complex enough so that there is always something unexpected that may come out of that experience.’