The Village Voice, November 20, 1984

Exercises for the Figure

…Throughout the late ‘70s, Ida Applebroog’s work came mostly in the mail: small books of cryptically drawn and scripted scenes of domestic stress. Lately Applebroog has moved on, first to small multiscene paintings, now to large, more painterly canvasses and a series of multi-page drawings. The extent to which her expansion of means has expanded the meaning of her art is extremely impressive.

Like many painters today, Applebroog borrows from formalist painting to narrate open-ended, real-life situations. Her new work employs thick monochrome grounds of red, black, and white, separate panels, and one-color images. Best of all Applebroog has devised a way of both painting and drawing with a palette knife which builds on the old photograph/children’s coloring-book look of her art, and adds another level of reality to contrast with her black-on-white outline images. She’s not without debts- a general one to David Salle, a more explicit one to Nancy Dwyer- but it doesn’t matter, her subject is her own.

Applebroog has always dealt with relationships between men and women, often quite humorously, but now she is taking on a huge swatch of the fabric of societal- and inherently paternalistic- interaction. She’s particularly good at evoking the mixture of fantasy and well- or not so well-intentioned teachings children are subjected to. In Missionary Sisters of the Immaculate Heart of Mary, she outlines a young child who looks at a pink palette-knifed image of the pope. In the narrow predella-like panel about we see her thoughts, also pink: a nun on the toilet, another nun flexing enormous biceps while wearing only a wimple and a bra. Not for nothing is this show entitled “Inmates and Others.” Other paintings deal with more official crimes. Lovelace Clinic combines a series of literal and figurative oral fixations and subjugations to suggest how idle teens can grow up to be downtrodden men and maybe rapists. And in Hillcrest State the schematic but convincing outline of a glassy-eyed ax murderer faces a diminutive doctor while the predella offers a beige “father image” and a small child balancing, aloft, on a man’s hand, “before the fall.”

Applebroog’s drawings deal with more subtle and ambiguous exchanges, often involving aged, kissing couples (these are particularly wonderful), and outline the range of human gesture and relationships she has at/in her fingertips. There’s plenty of room for improvement- the paintings seem nearly overburdened by Appelbroog’s ability to append layer after layer of suggestion onto their surfaces; the drawings should become less illustrational- but she has an extraordinary distillation of ideas about living, art making, and storytelling under consideration.

ROBERTA SMITH