She won’t be walled in
Polly Apfelbaum’s new show is a riot of color and craft
EAST PROVIDENCE — Polly Apfelbaum’s new show at ODDKIN, “The World’s a Mess; It’s in My Kiss,” is an eruption of the artist’s exuberant, orderly-yet-messy aesthetic on the gallery’s walls and floor.
Apfelbaum, 68, made a splash in the 1990s with her “fallen paintings,” sprawling, tactile installations of fabric scraps (velvet was a favorite) marked with dye. A sensualist and a colorist, she arrayed them on the floor for a daring, democratizing effect — something that looked like a painting laid where people shuffle by in street shoes, and where small children might want to play.
In recent years, the artist has been crafting ceramics, hanging beads, placing tiles on walls and mugs on tabletops, and, in this show, she brings glazed clay tiles to the floor.
But first, an actual painting on the wall: “Hilma Heads.” Apfelbaum often uses color charts as an organizing structure. Here, 100 paper circles each feature two colors in gouache. The ravishing tonal juxtapositions wink; the texture is like suede.
The title nods to Hilma af Klint, who painted mystical abstractions as Modernism dawned. “Hilma Heads” feels like a portal humming with energy, ready to welcome viewers to the next world: two floor-based tile installations, “Compulsory Figures (slabs)” and “Bits and Pieces (floor).”
Compulsory figures are a figure skater’s system of movements and the patterns they draw on ice. This piece reprises Apfelbaum’s 1996 velvet installation of rectangles in paired colors. Here, she puts 100 glazes in a range of colors side by side on 50 terracotta slabs. Like a skater’s compulsory figures, this piece grapples with standards — the minimalist grid, the color chart. But glazes are unpredictable. Surfaces mist, glisten, or develop texture. Perfection is impossible.
“Bits and Pieces (floor)” is the real showstopper. Apfelbaum took 492 leftover scraps of clay too small to use elsewhere and made tiles. Some are only 1 inch square. She carved and glazed patterns of dots, diamonds, braids, and concentric circles. The display resembles the fruits of an archeological dig laid on the ground to be sorted, full of potential for sense-making.
In all three installations, color, tactility, and the unpredictability of making push against established systems, like a painting falling to the floor. We will always end up coloring outside the lines, they seem to say. We might as well enjoy it.