IDA APPLEBROOG

Ida Applebroog is an award-winning NewYork based abstract multi-media artist known for her compelling and occasionally offputting paintings. To be completely candid, I initially only chose to do my blog post on her because I thought she had a cool name but after delving deeper into her work I’ve fallen in love with her twisted portraits. She initially started making art after committing herself to a psych ward and doing art therapy to cope and after being discharged she continued creating. About 40 years later she managed to recover her initial 109 small emotionally compelling drawings from storage within the hospital from her time spent there and curated an exhibition of them called “Mercy Hospital”(2009) about her time here.

Her main works are eerie animalistic creatures and human-like figures with boundless outlines, these “everyman” silhouettes make her style easily recognizable. What makes Applebroog’s work really special is the various social commentaries she implements into her work. Her messages explore ideas of gender/ sexual identity, power struggles, political violence, feminism, and society social issues to name a few.

Aside from exhibiting her iconic paintings Applebroog also makes several sculptures, art books, short films, and animated shorts as well as large-scale art installations. Some of her popular exhibitions include, “Mercy Hospital”, “Marginalia”, “Vagina Drawings” and, “Monalisa”. I’ve noticed that many of her pieces aren’t necessarily individual works but instead are small pieces in a collective series. My favourite exhibition from her is “Monalisa” which features a wooden house-like structure with different canvas paintings and drawings on the outside and inside like wallpaper. Some of the drawings/ paintings consist of old and new sketchbook pages from different times in her life made to help her feel grounded being a single mother of four, most of these sketches were abstractions of her body. The spatial element to the installation is unique and plays with lighting and perspective adding a transparent glow through several of the pieces. Inside the structure, there is a wall-sized creepy, lumpy figure in all red staring at the audience as they observe the other paintings. The pose the figure is placed in also references Duchamp’s infamous ‘Étant Donnés’.