Polly Apfelbaum

(American, born 1955)

Polly Apfelbaum is a contemporary American artist best known for her self-described “fallen paintings.” Composed of brightly dyed fabric pieces that are often strewn across the floor, her works blur the boundaries of installation, painting, and sculpture. “Fabric can never be totally controlled and is never the same,” she said. “It has a mind of its own and is open to chance. I have always felt like an in-between artist, working in the space between painting and sculpture, between narrative and abstraction, between form and color, control and chance, beauty and not beauty.” Born in 1955 in Abington, PA, Apfelbaum received her BFA from Tyler School of Art in Philadelphia in 1978. The artist began her professional career in New York, with her first solo show in 1986. Throughout the late 1980s and 1990s, she contributed to a number of significant group exhibitions, including the integral “Sense and Sensibility: Women and Minimalism in the 90s” at The Museum of Modern Art in New York. Notably, she has been the recipient of a Joan Mitchell Grant, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and the Pollock Krasner Foundation Grant. Apfelbaum currently lives and works in New York, NY. The artist’s works are included in the collections of The Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and the Dallas Museum of Art.