Ida Applebroog in "Power"
Ida Applebroog
True to her fiercely independent spirit, Ida Applebroog invented her own last name. In similar fashion, her diverse body of work defies labels, spanning a dizzying array of media including drawings, paintings, books, photographs, sculptures, and installations. The constant that emerges is a trenchant social commentary expressed through images culled from mass media.
“It’s hard to say what your work is about” she says, “but for me, it’s about how power works: male over female, parents over children, governments over people, doctors over patients.” Her work skews ordinary images into anxious scenarios infused with irony and black humor. Once “computer illiterate,” Applebroog recently decided to embrace technology and now creates enormous photographic prints.
Featured artists
About the artists
Ida Applebroog has been making pointed social commentary in the form of beguiling comic-like images for nearly half a century. Anonymous “everyman” figures, anthropomorphized animals, and half-human/half-creature characters are featured players in the uncanny theater of her work. Applebroog propels her paintings and drawings into the realm of installation by arranging and stacking canvases in space, exploding the frame-by-frame logic of comic book and film narrative into three-dimensional environments. Strong themes in her work include gender and sexual identity, power struggles both political and personal, and the pernicious role of mass media in desensitizing the public to violence.
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