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Easy-Bake Art

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The Daily Pic: Polly Apfelbaum does very serious play

Polly Apfelbaum at Ameringer, McEnery, Yohe

(Photo by Lucy Hogg)

For years now, Polly Apfelbaum has managed to channel the idea of unbridled artistic play – one of the oldest cliches in modern art – without ever seeming childish or glib or cliche. In the recent group show called “Stone Gravy”, curated by David Pagel for Ameringer, McEnery, Yohe gallery in New York, a table laid with her plasticine abstractions seems complex and fresh and sophisticated. Maybe that’s because Apfelbaum’s abstraction always seem to be so much about reality – in this case, about cooking and tiling and decorating decisions – that it has the depth and complexity of representation. Show us the world, and we’ll burrow into it. 

For a full visual survey of past Daily Pics visit blakegopnik.com/archive.

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Blake Gopnik is a contributing critic to Newsweek and The Daily Beast and writes on art and design for a wide range of publications. He previously spent a decade as chief art critic of The Washington Post and before that was an arts editor and critic in Canada. He has a doctorate in art history from Oxford University, and has written on aesthetic topics ranging from Facebook to gastronomy.

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