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.
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