Biography of Ida Applebroog
Ida Applebroog’s intimate explorations of identity and gender have established her place as one of the most influential artists of our day. Applebroog, born in NY in 1929, famously made a series of 150 sketches of her naked body in the bathtub at home, which she showed in public for the first time over forty years after their execution, at Hauser & Wirth in 2010. Applebroog’s artistic career has been a constant process of revelation, in which she has explored the power struggles we experience every day through her anonymous “everyman” characters and ever more publically through her own self.
Ida Applebroog’s simplified human figures, comic-book-like and grotesque, are instantly recognizable, and lend themselves perfectly, visually as well as conceptually, to the medium of print-making. The depiction of ordinary domestic roles, limitations and challenges in such strikingly clear visual terms violently confronts today’s accepted norms.
Applebroog’s work is in the collections of The Museum of Modern Art, Guggenheim Museum, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Corcoran Museum of Art, the Whitney Museum of Art, and others. She was profiled in the PBS documentary “Art 21: Art in the Twenty-first Century” and in full length film “Call Her Applebroog”. She has received many awards, including a John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Achievement Award and a Lifetime Achievement Award from the College Art Association. Her work has been shown in many one-person exhibitions in the United States and abroad, including the Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston, and High Museum of Art, Atlanta, among others.
