D’Amelio Terras, New York
November 10 – December 23, 2005
D’Amelio Terras is pleased to present an exhibition of new works by New York artist Polly Apfelbaum. She will show sculptures that recall cartoon drawings of flowers, bones, and eyes. The focus of the show is a rectangular manifestation of Cartoon Garden, a large-scale black and white dyed fabric sculpture that will cover the majority of the gallery’s floor space. These will be shown alongside Polaroids developed during a fellowship at Massachusetts College of Art, Boston, MA.
Cartoon Garden is part of Apfelbaum’s ongoing body of work, which consists of pieces of dyed fabric arranged on the floor into large-scale fields. Apfelbaum refers to these meticulously arranged works as “fallen paintings,” abstract works that inhabit the floor instead of painting’s traditional territory of wall and canvas. Lane Relyea states in What Does Love Have to Do With It, a catalogue of Apfelbaum’s work produced by the Massachusetts College of Art: “Apfelbaum’s work is both painting and sculpture, perhaps photography and fashion and formless material process as well. It is all these things –wildly so and wildly not so.”
For this exhibition, Apfelbaum expands the hybrid nature of her work to include an exploration of the graphic quality of drawing. Cartoon Garden is black and white as opposed to her primarily color saturated works; figural and geometric in composition as opposed to her expansive abstract forms. By emptying out vivid color in favor of shades of black she focuses on variation of line weight. By strictly arranging her sculpture into a rectangle she references the sheet of paper as the support for the medium.
Polly Apfelbaum’s recent exhibitions include Extreme Abstraction, Albright Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, NY, 2005; Good and Plenty, Gallery Nacht St. Stephan, Vienna, Austria, 2005; and Crazy Love, Love Crazy, Contemporary Art Museum, St. Louis, MO, 2004. A survey of Apfelbaum’s work was presented at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia, PA and traveled to various venues. Selected public collections include: The Dallas Museum of Art, Dallas, TX; The Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY; Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, CA; The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY. Two catalogues, Polly Apfelbaum from the Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia and What Does Love Have to Do With It will be available during the exhibition.
