About the work

Polly Apfelbaum has created her edition Target Practice, 2021, especially for Whitechapel Gallery to accompany the exhibition Desde el Salón (From the Living Room): Sol Calero selects from the Hiscox Collection, 19 May - 15 Aug 2021.

The target is a recurring motif in Apfelbaum’s work, in recent times appearing on rugs for her Ikon Gallery exhibition ‘Waiting for the UFO's’ (2018). These earlier targets used primary colours.  ‘ Target Practice' is one of a new series of enamel targets in which the artist uses secondary or ’off’ colours with a pink background. For Apfelbaum these new  less 'pop' colour relations, suggest a different aura of colour, for the current moment.  The colours are also particular to the enamel sign company that produced them, the process therefore influencing Apfelbaum's palette.

About the artist

Polly Apfelbaum, b. 1955, Pennsylvania, USA, Live and works in New York. 

Polly Apfelbaum works across sculpture, painting, craft and installation. Colour is both a medium and subject in her practice.

Selected exhibitions

Recent solo exhibitions include: Red Desert, Red Mountain, Red Sea, Magazin III, Jaffa, Israel (2021), Waiting for the UFOs (a space set between a landscape and a bunch of flowers), Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, Kansas City (2019), Waiting for the UFOs (a space set between a landscape and a bunch of flowers), Ikon Gallery, Birmingham (2018), The Sound of Ceramics, a site-specific installation at PLAY Kortrijk, Belgium (2018), Polly Apfelbaum: Dubuffet's Feet My Hands, Golden Square, Frith Street Gallery, London (2017), Life is not black and white, L’Art dans les Chapelles, a site-specific installation at Chapelle Saint Jean, Le Sourn (2017), Chromatic Scale: Prints by Polly Apfelbaum, National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington DC (2017), Tell it Slant, Soho Square, Frith Street Gallery, London (2016), City of Lights,  Center for the Arts at Virginia Tech, VA (2015), Deep Purple, Red Shoes, Be-Part, Waregem, Belgium (2015), Polly Apfelbaum: Colour Sessions, Golden Square, Frith Street Gallery, London (2014), Colour Stations Portland,  Lumber Room, Portland (2014), Evergreen Blueshoes, BCA Centre, Burlington (2014), Second That Emotion,  Mumbai Art Room, Mumbai (2013), Planiverse, Galerie nächst St. Stephan Rosemarie Schwarzwälder, Austria (2012), Flatland: Color Revolt, Hansel & Gretel Picture Garden, NY (2012)

Museum collections include MoMA, the Whitney Museum of Art, L.A. County Museum of Art, Philadelphia Museum of Art, Dallas Museum of Art and Musee d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris.

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