Starting in the late 1980s, Polly Apfelbaum began working her way from wall to floor and from sculpture to painting. This, of course, is a seemingly backward proposition. But so is the nature of Apfelbaum's art, as a glance into the gallery at four of her "fallen paintings" suggests. Cut from fabric and arranged on the floor, these works occupy a unique space and have the structure of sculpture. Pulsing with color and with the energy of lines, drips, stains, pours, and other marks of the artist's hand, they also have all the hallmarks of painting. Indeed, one of the achievements of Apfelbaum's art is its steadfast refusal to be one thing or the other. Concerned as much with art as with craft, color as with form, order as with chaos, her art embraces many seemingly contradictory concerns. In so doing, it presents us, as viewers, with a generous sense of optimism: We can, in fact, have it all.

This exhibition, Apfelbaum's first museum survey, represents the past fifteen years of the artist's work. Raining chains of color, the wallpaper installation Oblong was created as a new work for this show. Born in 1955, in Abington, Pennsylvania, she grew up outside of Philadelphia and attended Tyler School of Art before settling in New York. Since the mid-1990s, she has been known for producing site-specific, installation-scaled works that, with each element laid out by hand, are intensely time-consuming to compose. Hence the challenge of producing a survey is one not only of scale (a single work can take up an entire gallery), but of sheer labor.

Polly Apfelbaum's first sculpture emerged in the context of found-object and appropriation-based art of the mid-1980s. Inside the gallery the materials and assemblages appear relatively "readymade." The Color of My Fate (1990), for example, is a cardboard box full of party streamers. It also signals a shift in Apfelbaum's art towards a new interest in color. Traditionally the stuff of painting, color is considered sensual, decorative, feminine, and formless. Another impulse expressed early on in Apfelbaum's work involves mark-making and a sense of bodily touch. Among her first stained-fabric sculptures, Peggy Lee and the Dalmatians (1992) appears not only splattered and scrunched by hand, but also shed, as though some disrobing had taken place.

Because of her use of strong color, craft processes and materials, Apfelbaum's art participates in the feminist critique of some of the basic rules of modernism. Indeed, some of the most important precedents for her work come from the 1970s generation of artists, who responded to the rigors of Minimalism by making sculpture that was soft and flowing (Lynda Benglis), or that appeared to have been exploded, scattered throughout space (Barry Le Va). Apfelbaum's own big breakthrough in space occurred in 1996, when she started making room-scale installations. Structural experiments in color and repetition, these works comprise hundreds of small, hand-dyed pieces of velvet layered and arranged according to color systems the artist devises in advance. In viewing these works, we are made to feel deeply aware of the floor and the walls alike: we feel ourselves to be a contiguous part of works in space.

Claudia Gould, Director
Ingrid Schaffner, Senior Curator
Institute of Contemporary Art, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia

This exhibition is curated by Claudia Gould and Ingrid Schaffner and organized by the Institute for Contemporary Art, University of Pennsylvania. ICA acknowledges the generous funding support awarded by The Buddy Taub Foundation, the Peter Norton Family Foundation, and Altria Group, Inc. ICA is also grateful for the generous support of the members of ICA's New York Leadership Circle: Christopher J. Carrera Foundation; Ashley Bernhard & Jason Bernhard; Cecile D'Amelio & Christopher D'Amelio; Karen Finerman; The Ford Family Foundation/Virginia Ford & David Ford; Glenn R. Fuhrman; James N. Gray Foundation; Katherine Greenberg; Amy Segal & Phillipe Heilberg; K. Hovnanian Enterprises, Inc.; Janedesign; Craig Beresin; Anurag Bhargava; Paula & Robert Hoy; Nicole & Michael Kubin; Eric S. Lane; Marc Lisker; Ladd McQuade; Amy & John Phelan; The Right Stuff Foundation; Pamela & Arthur Sanders; Daniel C. Scheffey; Joey & Christopher Schlank; Victoria Voytek & Robert Fogelson & Candice Worth. Additional support has been provided by The Horace W. Goldsmith Foundation, the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, The Dietrich Foundation Inc., the William Penn Foundation, the Overseers Board for the Institute of Contemporary Art, friends and members of ICA, and the University of Pennsylvania.

Contemporary Arts Center Installation Sponsor: Clark, Schaefer, Hackett & Co.

2003-2004 CAC Season Presenting Sponsor: Dr. Stanley & Mickey Kaplan