For more than 40 years, Ida Applebroog has been creating sharply observed, deadpan drawings of everymen and everywomen in often-ambiguous situations. Her earliest drawings were cartoonish, rendered in the style of instruction-manual illustrations. Since then, she’s made forays into bold color, layered imagery and Expressionist painting, but here, she returns to line drawing with images digitally printed on Mylar.
The show centers around larger-than-life renderings of solitary people. Each mostly nude figure occupies its own translucent vertical panel and sports his or her own distinctive accoutrement—a single purple loafer with tassels, an artificial limb, a head of Medusa-like hair. Even as they advertise their individuality, they seem oddly less dimensional than Applebroog’s inscrutable protagonists of decades past. The difference between then and now is underscored by the inclusion of her 1978 animated video, It’s No Use Alberto, a family epic told in short, painful encounters between cardboard shadow puppets.
While Applebroog’s subjects could be seen as self-affirming, they also read as brands. Either way, the artists’s gimlet eye for human foibles remains undiminished.—Anne Doran