Exhibition Preview: Ida Applebroog, Portraits

Ida Applebroog (1929–2023) was one of the foremost feminist artists of her generation, describing herself as ‘a woman artist with feminist concerns’. She came to prominence in New York in the 1970s with a series of small self-published books that she sent in the mail and became known for both her instantly recognisable style of simplified human forms with bold outlines, and her focus on themes of violence and power, and on women in the domestic, social and sexual arenas.

The exhibition at Fruitmarket opens with a selection of Applebroog’s Angry Birds of America, portraits of birds drawn from death, (as was the case for the great eighteenth and nineteenth century ornithologist illustrators, from John James Audubon to Alexander Wilson, both of whom Applebroog references). The birds were drawn in 2018, during Donald Trump’s first US Presidential term, and somehow encapsulate the distress and despair felt by many people at his policies then, and again now: ‘I started calling them “Angry Birds of America”. It was just something that stuck in my head. And then I realised I was in the middle of the Trump era. There was a lot of anger, not just me, but all over America. My feeling was, whatever I was doing, it had to do with angry dead birds’.

The exhibition continues with a crowd of larger-than-life representations of naked people printed and painted on thin, translucent mylar and suspended in the space. The series is called Ethics of Desire and is inspired both by the flood of advertising imagery that confronts us daily in the urban space, and the philosopher Plato’s philosophical and ethical exploration of our desires and the ways in which they shape our lives. As though on a catwalk or dating app, and representing a wide variety of human bodies, the figures strut and stomp towards us. Their unabashed nakedness is continued in Monalisa, a rudimentary house-like structure onto which are affixed a patchwork of drawings made in 2009 from private sketch books in which, in 1969, Applebroog drew what she could see of her vulva in a mirror, every day for several weeks.

Monalisa has been described as ‘a portrait of the exquisite unresolved tensions between self-disclosure and interiority, public and private life, the priorities of womanhood and the prerogatives of an artist’. It completes this exhibition’s presentation of the astonishingly inventive work of Ida Applebroog, its investigation into the way she looked at things (birds, bodies, desire, herself) and the kinds of marks she made to describe and transmit what she saw, her work making space in the world for her and for us.