ARTnews, February 1985

IDA APPLEBROOG

In her latest series of works, Applebroog leaves behind the trademark narrative format of her window paintings. Gone are the half-drawn shades through which viewers once witnessed humorous soap-opera installments of human passion and betrayal. The artist’s loaded captions - “I’m not your son” or “Where do I come from” – are also gone, and her emblematic figures now stand alone and silent, filling the entire space of oversize canvases.

Applebroog bestows a new ironic force on her recent images. Realized in the same deadpan linear style, the cast of characters embodies the broad theme of social and political alienation. These cartoon-style portraits of society’s outcasts – from orphans and bag ladies to disabled veterans – represent different forms of institutionalized loneliness and poverty that permeate contemporary culture. The titles of the paintings are taken from the names of actual hospitals, asylums and old-age homes.

While the large-scale figures are the work’s dominant feature, smaller shadow images elaborate on Applebroog’s meanings. For example, floating above the saluting Boy Scout in Willow Point V.A. (1983-84 are visions of injured and wheelchair-bound soldiers. Together, these fragments add up to a concise

Visually, the new paintings are among Applebroog’s most striking. The impact of their billboard scale is further emboldened by startling contrasts of color: hot pinks and reds set against black and white backgrounds lend a note of alarm and urgency. The artist’s emphatically schematic compositions are also effective in getting across the politicized point.

What is missing in these works is the voyeuristic intimacy of the window paintings. Polemics rather than innuendo characterize the new canvases. However bold in their realization, the “inmate” images are cool and didactic expressions, and their emotional impact is short-lived.

DEBORAH PHILLIPS