Polly Apfelbaum

Polly E. Apfelbaum is an American contemporary visual artist, who is primarily known for her colorful drawings, sculptures, and fabric floor pieces, which she refers to as "fallen paintings". She currently lives and works in New York City, New York.

Polly Apfelbaum was born in 1955 in Abington Township, Montgomery County, Pennsylvania. Apfelbaum has lived and worked in New York City since 1978. That same year, she received her BFA from the Tyler School of Art in Elkins Park, Pennsylvania. Apfelbaum also received training from SUNY Purchase College in New York. She has been showing her work consistently in the United States and internationally since her first one-person show in 1986.

Apfelbaum came to prominence in the 1990s and is best known for what the artist refers to as her "fallen paintings." These large-scale, 'anti-monumental', horizontal installations consist of hundreds of hand-cut and hand-dyed pieces of velvet fabric that are arranged on the floor. These installations exist as a hybrid between painting and sculpture and occupy an ambiguous space between the two genres. Lane Relyea states "Apfelbaum's work is both painting and sculpture, and perhaps photography and fashion and formless material process as well."In 2003, a major mid-career survey show of Apfelbaum's work opened at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia. The show traveled through 2004 to the Contemporary Arts Center in Cincinnati, OH, and the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art in Kansas City, MO. In conjunction with the exhibition, a catalogue surveying 15 years of the artist's work was published by the Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia.

Text courtesy of Wikipedia, 2023