© Polly Apfelbaum


Polly Apfelbaum
Love Sculpture



Frith Street Gallery is pleased to announce the first one-person exhibition of New York artist Polly Apfelbaum in the UK.


Apfelbaum's work consists primarily of large-scale installations which cover vast portions of museum or gallery floors. Described by the artist as "fallen paintings" these works are hybrids, poaching in fields already seemingly well defined, twisting categories into different forms. As critic Lane Reylea has written: "Apfelbaum's work is both painting and sculpture, and perhaps photography and fashion and formless material process as well. It is all these things-wildly so and wildly not so."


Apfelbaum's installations are highly ephemeral in nature; at the end of an exhibition the pieces are dismantled - never to be reconstituted in the same way again. She embraces the phenomenological effects of Minimal and post-Minimal art but is equally concerned with the power of colour to produce emotion. In this series, there is a greater concern with the graphic quality of drawing, the arc of the hand, the liquidity of the stain and the weight of the line.


The two floor based works in this exhibition almost fill the entire gallery. "The Painted Desert" runs the full length of the space. This piece is composed of square sections of fabric in orange and pink, each square a separate painting covered with abstract black expressionistic lines in different geometric compositions. The colour shifts as the viewer walks along the edge of the work. A "cheap magic" from dark to light is created by the direction of the nap of the fabric. The other piece in the gallery, "Green Space" takes the form of a wedge of lurid green fabric described by the artist as a monochromatic, artificial, glowing, urban flower patch.


Polly Apfelbaum was born in 1955 in Abington, Pennsylvania and has lived and worked in New York city since 1978. Recent exhibitions include "Comic Abstraction" at MoMA, New York, "Extreme Abstraction" at the Albright Knox Museum, Buffalo, NY, "The Shape of Color" at Art Gallery of Ontario, and "Like Color in Pictures" at the Aspen Musuem of Art. A mid-career survey, initiated by the ICA in Philadelphia, traveled 2003-4. Recent solo shows include "Love Street" at Angles Gallery, Los Angeles 2007 and "Love Craft" at Virginia Commonwealth University, Richmond, Virginia.


Exhibition: 29 June - 17 August 2007
Gallery hours: Tues-Fri 10 am - 6 pm, Sat 11 am - 5 pm


Frith Street Gallery
17-18 Golden Square
GB-London W1F 9JJ UK
Telephone +44 20 7494 1550
Fax +44 20 7287 3733
Email info@frithstreetgallery.com

www.frithstreetgallery.com