She is known for her palette of stunning, eye-popping colors and hues. These works transform the colors of mass culture - of television, saturated magazine ads, and Wonder Bread bags - into wild, oscillating spectra bordering on the organic. Dusk red blobs fan rows of yellow leaves; and teardrop shapes of black nudge indigo forms resembling algal blooms. In this way, Apfelbaum's painting pushes past its traditional disciplinary forms, off the wall, and into pop culture.
Cinergy Foundation Gallery, Dorothy W. Reed Gallery, Federated Department Stores Foundation Gallery, James A. and Mary Miller Gallery, Larry and Rhonda Sheakley Foundation Gallery, and Lucille and Philip Meyers, Sr. Gallery
Polly Apfelbaum is widely regarded as one of the most influential painters of the last decade. She creates what she calls "fallen paintings," hybrid works of rare beauty that exist in a continuous, ambivalent space between painting, sculpture, and installation art. Often arranged on the floor, spreading around corners in indeterminate shapes, Apfelbaum's overall forms comprise intricate, nearly psychedelic layers of dyed fabric, as if myriad smaller paintings had grown outward from a central cluster of colorful shapes.
She is known for her palette of stunning, eye-popping colors and hues. These works transform the colors of mass culture - of television, saturated magazine ads, and Wonder Bread bags - into wild, oscillating spectra bordering on the organic. Dusk red blobs fan rows of yellow leaves; and teardrop shapes of black nudge indigo forms resembling algal blooms. In this way, Apfelbaum's painting pushes past its traditional disciplinary forms, off the wall, and into pop culture. Her work insists upon the pleasurable potential of visual aesthetic experience.
Polly Apfelbaum is a graduate of the Tyler School of Art. She has had solo exhibitions at Bowdoin College Museum of Art, Maine; Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia; Kiasma, Helsinki; and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago.
This exhibition is curated by Claudia Gould and Ingrid Schaffner and organized by the Institute for Contemporary Art, University of Pennsylvania.
Image:
Polly Apfelbaum, Ice (detail)
1998, Collection of the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, Photo credit: Adam Reich
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