In this video we have a look an exhibition with works by the American artist Ida Applebroog. The exhibition titled “Monalisa” was on show at Hauser & Wirth New York from January 19 to March 6, 2010. The centerpiece of Monalisa is a room-sized wooden structure covered with more than 100 new works based on vagina drawings, Ida Applebroog created in 1969, when she was living with her husband and four children in southern California. Ida Applebroog has scanned the original drawings onto handmade Gampi paper, enlarged and digitally manipulated them. The exterior and interior walls of the wooden structure are a patchwork of the new vellum drawings. On the interior back wall hangs Ida Applebroog’s large painting (Monalisa) of a reclining doll-like figure. The exhibition at Hauser & Wirth New York also included a selection of the original vagina drawings from 1969.
Ida Applebroog was born in Bronx, New York, in 1929, and lives and works in Manhattan. Her work is included in many public collections in the United States. Ida Applebroog was born in the Bronx, New York in1929, and lives and works in Manhattan. She attended the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and received an honorary doctorate from the New School university / Parsons School of Design. Applebroog has been making pointed social commentary in the form of beguiling comic-like images for nearly half a century in work best known for ‘everyman’ figures, anthropomorphized animals and half human-half creature characters, all players in the political theater of her work. Strong elements of Applebroog’s Å“uvre include gender and sexual identity, power struggles both political and personal, and the pernicious role of mass media in desensitizing the general public to violence.
Ida Applebroog: Monalisa at Hauser & Wirth, New York. With an introduction by Blair Taylor (Associate Sales Director Hauser & Wirth New York), March 3/4, 2010.
