A self-proclaimed ‘generic artist’ and an ‘image scavenger,’ painter and feminist pioneer Ida Applebroog spent the past six decades conducting a sustained inquiry into the polemics of human relations. She explored themes of violence and power, gender politics, women’s sexuality and domestic space using images stylistically reminiscent of comics, at once beguiling and disturbing.
Applebroog first came to attention in New York in the mid-1970s, formulating her practice with a series of small self-published books, ‘Stagings’ of identical cartoon images presented in succession, evocative of flipbooks or film stills, which she mailed to other artists, writers and individuals. From this beginning, she developed an instantly recognizable style of simplified human forms with bold outlines. In an Applebroog exhibition, the visitor becomes an observer and a participant in a domestic drama where fragmented narrative scenes are neither beginnings nor ends to the story.
