Document a 13 ida applebroog biography

The exhibition the Museo Reina Sofía devotes to Ida Applebroog (New York, 1929) is the largest and most exhaustive retrospective of her work to date. The selection of pieces, spanning more than five decades, places the stress on the interests and concerns that were constants across her life, such as violence, power, gender politics and female sexuality.

Her feminist stance, her approach to the object as an element of performance and the material diversity of her work form the cornerstones of a practice that began during her time as a student at the Art Institute of Chicago, from 1965 to 1968. After such a powerful and enriching period, Ida Applebroog moved to San Diego, California, with her husband and four children — tough years that for her developed into a deep depression and, ultimately, a nervous breakdown that would see her admitted to Mercy Hospital San Diego in 1969. Three long, dark months of convalescence, however, would also be a period of introspection that helped her shape her true identity and, in essence, affirm her calling as an artist. Ida dropped her married name (Horowitz) and maiden name (Applebaum), conceiving of a new surname, Applebroog, as part of her process to resignify her self.

The point of departure of the present retrospective is the broad set of ink, watercolour and pencil drawings she made in Mercy Hospital as part of her rehabilitation therapy. After her stay at the hospital, the artist drew her genitals every day over a two-month period; a series of works she would later reinterpret in the installation Monalisa (2006–2009). It was during the years between 1960 and 1970 that Applebroog sketched the outlines that would form the backbone of her later work. Unbeknownst to her at the time, she would also align with the sweeping contemporary feminist activism and it became one of the pivots of her artistic practice in the 1970s; the return to New York, where she still lives, also saw her become actively involved and participate in

These drawings from the forgotten sketchbooks of the well-known feminist artist Ida Applebroog offer an intimate insight into her struggle with depression during a six-week stay at Mercy Hospital in 1969

Hauser & Wirth, London
19 May – 29 July 2017

by ANNA McNAY

In 1969, Ida Horowitz (b1929), a struggling artist and mother of four, recently moved from Chicago to San Diego, was driving her two young sons to the zoo when suddenly she felt herself unravelling. She was unable to tell red from green, and her children had to guide her through set upon set of traffic lights. Later that day, recognising the danger, she checked herself into the mental health ward of Mercy Hospital.

Ida – who went on to become the internationally successful feminist artist Ida Applebroog (a made-up surname adopted when she felt the need to distance herself from both her maiden name, Appelbaum, and her married name, Horowitz) – had with her a sketchbook. During her six-week stay on the ward, she filled this with drawings and scribbled thoughts, and it is these excavations of her mind that now – after 40 years buried in a basement locker, until they were rediscovered by a studio assistant in 2009 – fill the walls of Hauser & Wirth London’s south gallery in a revealing and insightful show.

Ida Applebroog. Mercy Hospital, 1969. Ink and watercolour on paper, 35.6 x 27.9 cm (14 x 11 in). © Ida Applebroog. Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth. Photograph: Emily Poole.

There is an intimacy to these works, which are displayed unframed, with torn perforations down the side of each page, and were clearly never intended for public consumption. Fresh, raw and naive, the ambiguous, amorphous, porous forms are bodily, anatomical, like diagrams of the brain, or Louise Bourgeois’ bloody, seeping pregnant forms. Bodies are trapped within larger bodies, confined, restrained. In one, hands are joined, umbilically, accompanied by the scribbled words: “Hey,

In 2012 the New York artist Ida Applebroog participated in Documenta 13 in Kassel, Germany. For her show, she culled images and phrases from the journals she’d kept for decades, reproducing snippets of her writings on sandwich boards, as posters and fliers, and for the gallery wall. “I have a rhinestone uterus, a platinum vulva,” blared one. “How big is a normal penis?” asked another. “You are the patient. I am the real person,” declared a third.

“The journals are very private,” Applebroog explains in Call Her Applebroog, the new documentary about her life and work by Beth B, the beloved No Wave filmmaker who also happens to be the artist’s daughter. “I’ve taken them and made them very, very public. At this point you’ve let go of the secrets. Nothing is sacred.”

Call Her Applebroog, which opens at New York’s Metrograph theater tomorrow, assembles footage from fifteen years of mother/daughter filming. We follow the artist, now 86, as she installs several gallery shows, as she makes art in her Soho studio, as she goes through her apartment to find forgotten early work. In the process we learn only the broadest outlines of her biography: Applebroog was born Ida Applebaum to Orthodox Jewish immigrant parents in the Bronx. Her childhood was marked by religious repression, her early adulthood by personal repression. She spent time working in an ad agency, enduring brazen Mad Men–style sexual harassment, then married her high-school sweetheart, becoming Ida Horowitz. They had four children and left New York, heading first to Chicago, then to San Diego where, in her forties, Applebroog, deeply depressed, had herself committed to a mental hospital. She emerged with the resolve to move back to New York and become an artist. She also gave herself a new name: Applebroog.

The documentary reveals a woman as layered, wry and dark as the artwork that’s won her Guggenheim and MacArthur Foundation Fellowships, amid plenty of other recognition (coincidentally, a solo show

Artistic Director
Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev

Born in 1957 in Ridgewood, New Jersey, USA

Related Material