D’Amelio Terras, New York
July 8 – August 13, 2010
D’Amelio Terras is pleased to present a two-person exhibition featuring sculpture by gallery artists Polly Apfelbaum and Nicole Cherubini. Never before exhibited together, both bodies of work showcase an improvisational studio practice and engage an exchange about the dimensionality of clay and its potential for abstraction. In this exhibition, both artists raise their work off of the floor; Apfelbaum experiments with the elevated surface of a pedestal-like shelf whereas Cherubini’s work reclaims the conventionally painterly territory of the gallery wall.
Partially inspired by Eva Hesse’s tabletop ‘studioworks,’ a mélange of experimental works discovered in her studio posthumously, Polly Apfelbaum’s miniature samplers invoke a practice in which process and material are primary to object and abstraction explodes automatically from an exuberant dialogue between color and pattern. Apfelbaum’s nickname for these tactile works, “feelies,” pays homage to a trio of multimedia references: work by the same name of American potter Rose Cabat, the brightly colored canvases of Color Field painter Paul Feeley and the 1980’s underground rock band The Feelies. Unfired and still malleable, the polymer and plasticine clay panels present a kaleidoscopic landscape outlining a narrative built of compositional impulse. Uneven checkerboards, latticed squares, strident lines and multicolored spirals invite open-ended associations and defy precise categorization. Presented in a grid, the works both complement and oppose each other as irregular edges, right angles neighboring undulating arches, create surprises in negative space.
