The Fallen Painter
"Hybrid" artist Polly Apfelbaum starts from the ground up.
; "<i>Baby Love 35</i> by Polly Apfelbaum, multicolor woodblock monoprint")
Baby Love 35 by Polly Apfelbaum, multicolor woodblock monoprint (CLICK IMAGE FOR LARGER VERSION) |
Polly Apfelbaum has never been a stickler for definitions. While critics dance around the lines between painting, sculpture and installation art, pointing out the boundaries of each, she prefers to remain a self-described "hybrid." The result is a body of work that "poaches," in her words, some of the best elements from every medium, positioning itself jauntily between high art and low.
Her paintings (some of which are meant to be hung on a wall, while others are intended to lay flat on the floor) often depict flowers, rainbows and other forms in a vibrant palette that is reminiscent of pop culture at its most celebratory. Her large-scale fabric installations even toy with the elements of craft, which is only recently ceasing to be a dirty word in the art word.
It makes sense, then, that Apfelbaum's work should be included in "The HandMaking," a new exhibition at the Abington Art Center that celebrates artists who appropriate traditional or domestic crafts. "It's funny," she says, "because I went away from the hand and then came back to the hand, and it's a sense of control for me ... I create every shape and cut it out and make it, and for me it's the only way that I can know what I'm doing."
Inspired early on by the studied geometric abstraction of Amish quilts, Apfelbaum has since joined her passion for craft with her penchant for installation art. Her "fallen paintings" (which are not paintings at all, but meticulously arranged, often large-scale fabric installations) sprawl themselves out across the floor, as if the pigment had, by some fantastical trick of gravity, slid off the canvas and landed there. The overtly feminine imagery in these works (flowers, rainbows, Powerpuff Girls) suggests a self-conscious nod to the idea of the "fallen woman." "It's a silly phrase," she says, and the almost cartoonishly in-your-face girl-power iconography of her work makes that very clear.
A native of Abington, Apfelbaum attended Tyler School of Art, where she was originally trained in painting and printmaking. After graduating, she moved to New York and began to drift into sculpture, but she was quickly drawn into new territory. "At that time [1978], installation art was just starting to have a life of its own, and I'd never really seen or experienced this kind of exhibit work. And showing [my work] and thinking a lot about mixing and trying to figure out what my forms would be really opened me up to a lot of possibilities."
That openness is something she has always tried to cultivate. "I guess in New York it was a good time; there were a lot of different things going on and I just wanted to pull as many of those things into my language as possible."
Unlike the floor paintings of, say, Jackson Pollock, which testify to the frenzied action of their maker, Apfelbaum's are arranged with careful and measured simplicity. Flowers are her formal building block of choice, and she uses them the way Ellsworth Kelly uses squares, in a pared-down exploration of color and space.
In a characteristically restless development, Apfelbaum has recently begun a full-circle return to her roots as a painter and printmaker. She's even putting some of her work back on the wall. "The HandMaking" will feature two of her most recent monoprints, reminiscent of Matisse's late paper cutouts. "I feel like [now] I can come to convention in an unconventional way. ... I just had to follow a certain path. And I had to learn a lot to even go back to the conventions of painting."
If anything, Apfelbaum's circuitous path has allowed her to challenge those conventions from the inside. The results, as her work reveals, have been explosive.
"The HandMaking," April 14-July 28, 515 Meetinghouse Road, Jenkintown, 215-887-4882, www.abingtonartcenter.org.
Also In This Week's Arts Section
Now See This
Comments
Be the first to comment on this article.