Polly Apfelbaum

Biography

Apfelbaum has lived and worked in New York City since 1978. That same year, she received her BFA from the Tyler School of Art in Elkins Park, Pennsylvania. She has been showing her work consistently in the United States and internationally since her first one-person show in 1986.

Apfelbaum came to prominence in the 1990s and is best known for what the artist refers to as her "fallen paintings." These large-scale installations consist of hundreds of hand-cut and hand-dyed pieces of velvet fabric that are arranged on the floor. These installations exist as a hybrid between painting and sculpture and occupy an ambiguous space between the two genres. Lane Relyea states "Apfelbaum's work is both painting and sculpture, and perhaps photography and fashion and formless material process as well."

In 2003, a major mid-career survey show of Apfelbaum's work opened at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia. The show traveled through 2004 to the Contemporary Arts Center in Cincinnati, OH, and the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art in Kansas City, MO. In conjunction with the exhibition, a catalogue surveying 15 years of the artist's work was published by the Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia.

Historic exhibitions

Polly Apfelbaum has held a number of historic solo exhibitions including The Night, San Francisco Art Institute, San Francisco; Reckless, Museum of Contemporary Art Kiasma; Helsinki, Finland; Skin and Bones, Bowdoin College, Brunswick, ME; What Does Love Have to Do With It, Massachusetts College of Art, Boston; Today I Love Everybody, Triple Candie, New York; and Crazy Love, Love Crazy, Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis, MO.

Apfelbaum's work has also been featured in a number of notable museum exhibitions including Sense and Sensibility: Women and Minimalism in the 90s, Comic Abstraction and Lines, Grids, Stains and Words, all at the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Painting-The Extended Field, Magasin 3, Stockholm, Sweden; Postmark: An Abstract Effect, Site Santa Fe, NM; Operativo, Museo Rufino Tamayo, Mexico City, Mexico; Sculpture as Field, Kunstverein Göttingen, Göttingen, Germany; The Eye of the Beholder, Dundee Contemporary Arts, Dundee, Scotland; As Painting: Division and Displacement, Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus, OH; Flowers Observed, Flowers Transformed at The Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh, PA; and Extreme Abstraction, at the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, NY.

She was featured in several biennale’s including Lodz Biennale, Lodz, Poland; Painting Outside Painting, 44th Corcoran Painting Biennial at the Corcoran Museum of Art in Washington D.C.; Other, 4th Biennale D'art Contemporain de Lyon, France; Everyday, 11th Biennale of Sydney, Australia; and Bienal de Valencia, Valencia, Spain.

Honours

Polly Apfelbaum was a 2012-2013 recipient of the Joseph H. Hazen Rome Prize, a prize which is awarded to a select group of individuals who represent the highest standard of excellence in the arts and humanities. She has also been a recipient of an Academy Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, a Joan Mitchell Grant, a Richard Diebenkorn Fellowship, a Guggenheim Fellowship, an Artist’s Fellowship from the New York Foundation for the Arts, and the Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant.

Public collections

Polly Apfelbaum's work is in a number of museum collections including: