POLLY APFELBAUM
Place of Residence: New York, NY
Date of Birth: 1955

Artist's Statement: Polly Apfelbaum's work operates most poignantly in its overt physicality, excessive beauty and hyper-sensuality, as well as through the manner in which it evokes emotional sensation. Her work is also strongly influenced by fashion colors and design, in the sense that they are unnatural, man-made and synthetic. It is at once trippy and hallucinogenic, with its strong sense of spectacle and explosion, and yet strangely hypnotic and calming with the central force pulling the viewer into a rainbow of saturated color. Apfelbaum describes her work as, "...hybrid works, poised between painting and sculpture; works not so much attempting to invent new categories but working promiscuously and improperly -poaching - in fields seemingly already well defined."

Biography

Polly Apfelbaum received her B.F.A. from Tyler School of Art in 1978. She has had solo exhibitions in numerous venues including Bowdoin College Museum of Art, Brunswisk, Maine; the Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia, PA; Kiasma, Helsinki, Finland; San Francisco Art Institute, San Francisco, CA; and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, IL.

Apfelbaum was awarded a Joan Mitchell Grant in 1999 and received a Richard Diebenkorn Teaching Fellowship in 2000. Her work can also be seen in a number of public collections such as the Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY; The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, IL; Magasin 3, Stockholm, Sweden; and the Musee d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, Paris, France.