Polly Apfelbaum
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Works
Polly Apfelbaum
Barn Star Park 1, 2022Woodblock, Monoprint
Fuji DHM-11 Kozo Misumi 536gsm, Cream
79 x 79 in
200.7 x 200.7 cmCopyright The Artist/Durham PressThe Barn Stars monoprint series plays with motifs seen in Pennsylvania folk art, specifically the geometric imagery found in quilts and hand-painted onto agricultural buildings, which Apfelbaum was exposed to...The Barn Stars monoprint series plays with motifs seen in Pennsylvania folk art, specifically the geometric imagery found in quilts and hand-painted onto agricultural buildings, which Apfelbaum was exposed to while growing up in the area. These patterns have become a focal point for Apfelbaum at Durham Press, often using them as a framework to explore color theory within their repeating structures. The Barn Stars have a physical presence, much like the quilts they are inspired from, created as each individual woodblock debosses into the print’s thick, textured Japanese paper.
Though each monoprint is constructed from the same modular parts, Apfelbaum is able to create dramatically different visual effects by manipulating color and form. A composition which seemed to radiate from its center as the print progressed from light to dark takes on a new form as she inverts its monochromatic gradient, creating a print where the same star now appears to collapse inwards. Other Barn Stars use stark, contrasting complimentary colors which shatter with outward energy instead of pulse as Apfelbaum emphasizes the sharp diamond woodblocks which form each star. She begins to play with these blocks, using larger diamonds to create simplified blocks of color or condenses multiple stars into a single print. The Barn Star monoprints seem to animate, both within themselves and throughout the series, as Apfelbaum captures movement within the boundaries of each new composition.
22of 22Viewing rooms
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Polly Apfelbaum | Solar Eclipse - Stripe for Stripe - Rainbow Monoprints
2008 - 2024 -
Polly Apfelbaum | Barn Star monoprints
2022 - 2023 -
Polly Apfelbaum | Heart and Soul – There Are Many Hearts
2020 -
Polly Apfelbaum | Targets
2019 – 2020 -
Polly Apfelbaum | Hudson River Valley Nirvana
2016 -
Polly Apfelbaum | Love Series
Come see how Polly Apfelbaum's celebrated prints were inspired and produced over two decades and launched the ambitious collaborations between Polly Apfelbaum and Durham Press, including several limited edition print... -
Polly Apfelbaum | Color Exercises
2002 -
Polly Apfelbaum | Three Flowers
2004
BiographyPolly Apfelbaum | Working on Love Park 9 Woodblock Mono Print 2006B. 1955, PHILADELPHIA, PA
New York based artist Polly Apfelbaum has been showing consistently in the US and abroad since the 1980s. She has been making prints with Durham Press since 2002 and exhibited a survey of that work in the 2017 exhibit Chromatic Scale: Prints by Polly Apfelbaum at the National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington, DC.
Solo exhibitions include Alexander Gray, New York (2017); Otis College of Art and Design, Los Angeles (2016); Bepart, Waregem, Belgium (2014); Worcester Art Museum, Worcester, MA (2014); Electric Zinia Factory, Germany (2014); lumber room, Portland, OR (2014); Mumbai Art Room, Mumbai, India (2013). T-Space, Milan, NY, (2012); Galerie Nachst St. Stephan, Vienna, (2012); D’Amelio Gallery, New York, (2012); Carlow Visual Center for Contemporary Art, Carlow, Ireland, (2009); and Milton Keynes Gallery, Milton Keynes, UK, (2009); Frith Street Gallery, London, (2007). A major mid-career survey of her work opened in 2003 at the Institute for Contemporary Art in Philadelphia, PA and traveled to Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, Kansas City, MO, and Contemporary Arts Center, Cincinnati, OH (2004).
Her work has been featured in important group exhibitions including Abstranded: Fiber and Abstraction in Contemporary Art, Everson Museum of Art, Syracuse, NY (2021); Pattern II, Anne Mosseri-Marlio Galerie, Basel, Switzerland (2020); Maneuver, Hunter College, New York, New York (2019); An Irruption of the Rainbow, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, CA (2016); Wall to Wall, MOCA Cleveland, Cleveland, OH (2016); Pretty Raw: After and Around Helen Frankenthaler, Rose Art Museum, Waltham, MA (2015); Three Graces, Everson Museum of Art, Syracuse, NY (2015); Pathmakers: Women in Art, Craft and Design, Midcentury and Today, Museum of Art and Design, New York (2015); AMERICANA: Formalizing Craft, Perez Art Museum Miami, Miami, FL (2013); Regarding Warhol: Sixty Artists, Fifty Years, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, (2012); Lines, Grids, Stains, and Words (2008), Comic Abstraction (2007), and Sense and Sensibility: Women and Minimalism in the 90’s (1994) all at the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Extreme Abstraction, Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, (2005); As Painting: Division and Displacement, Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus, OH, (2002); Operativo, Museo Rufino Tamayo, Mexico City, (2001).
Her work is in the collections of The Museum of Modern of Art, New York; The Whitney Museum of Art of American Art, New York; Brooklyn Museum of Art, New York; The Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles; Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, NY; The Henry Art Gallery, Seattle, WA; The Dallas Museum of Art, Dallas, TX; Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia, PA; The Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh, PA; Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, Philadelphia, PA; The Everson Museum of Art, Syracuse, NY; and the Perez Museum, Miami.
She was the recipient of a Pollack-Krasner Foundation grant in 1987, a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1993, an Artist’s Fellowship from the New York Foundation for the Arts in 1995, an Anonymous Was a Women Award in 1998, a Richard Diebenkorn Fellowship in 1999, a Joan Mitchell Fellowship in 1999, an Academy Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 2002, and the Rome Prize in 2012.
Apfelbaum is represented by Frith Street Gallery in London and Galerie nächst St. Stephan Gallery in Vienna.
