NYAB Event - Polly Apfelbaum "Flatterland Funkytown"

Polly Apfelbaum "Flatterland Funkytown"

D'Amelio Gallery

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Polly Apfelbaum’s inaugural exhibition at D’Amelio Gallery, Flatterland Funkytown, is a continuation of the artist’s long exploration of floor based works that oscillate between structure and formlessness.

The installation consists of hundreds of crushed synthetic velvet pieces, all hand-cut, dyed, and laid out across the gallery floor. Always situational, Apfelbaum’s intentional arrangements expose the temporal and improvisational currents running through her abstractions. The flatness that characterizes Apfelbaum’s installation is less about form than it is about horizontality, a structural flattening of hierarchy that can be found in musical forms such as funk and punk rock. Funkytown is part of series inspired by pop structures that give way to experimentation and unpredictability. The installation has a rhythm transmuted through the instruments of color, line and form.

In activating the floor as the site for the work, Apfelbaum’s approach also recalls art historian Leo Steinberg’s essay on the “flatbed picture plane”. For Steinberg, flatness functions as a bed for accumulation. The horizontality he identifies is experiential and process-based. Apfelbaum’s work engages the viewer in the process of making as opposed to simply looking. Apfelbaum titles the exhibition after the late 19th century novel, Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions by Edwin Abbott Abbott and the 2001 sequel Flatterland by the mathematician Ian Stewart. Both novels describe a two dimensional world where social hierarchies are reduced to shapes and lines therefore the possibilities of relational combinations and equations are endless. In Funkytown Flatterland, Apfelbaum imagines a similar relationship, where all matter is granted its individual role. All become part of her score.

Polly Apfelbaum is currently exhibiting Flatland: Color Revolt at Hansel & Gretel Picture Garden in New York. Upcoming exhibitions include: Regarding Warhol: Fifty Artists, Fifty Years at The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and Galerie Nächt St. Stephan Rosemarie Schwarzwälder in Vienna. Recent exhibitions include Double Nickels on the Dime at Michael Benevento in Los Angeles and Polly Apfelbaum: Haunted House in Amden Switzerland. Selected public collections include: The Dallas Museum of Art, Dallas, TX; The Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY; Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, CA; The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY.