Art & Antiques, February 1990

Ida Applebroog

Ida Applebroog’s disturbing images – skeletal animal legs trampling a landscape of irises and corpses, tubes suctioned onto someone’s back, an old man eating a tiny figure – hit a nerve. Her sinister masked surgeons and collusive politicians prey on our fears of a Big Brother-like world, and are effective if conventional. She sets a jarring tone and then keeps hammering it home with repeated images, and with expressions that range from anger to fear. But it’s the smaller, neutral images – a child lounging over a bowl of cereal, an old couple embracing, people picking apples – that are most interesting; harmless, perhaps comforting in another context, they seem ominous when juxtaposed with more overt scenes of terror or violence. So a man bending over to pick up something becomes imperiled; a woman bearing a present, vulnerable; a pseudo-Queen Elizabeth with a shopping bag, menacing. Though her work occasionally borders on the facile, Applebroog’s surfaces, with their yellowish medicinal sheen, are a chilling link to her themes.

ALEXANDRA ENDERS