Polly Apfelbaum | Love Series

Apfelbaum's flower prints - referred to as Loves - expanded to a wide variety of formats and scales, ranging from Little Loves at 20 x 20 inches to Love Parks at a staggering 79 x 79 inches. The Love series prints are most often created as monoprints, fitting for her unrestrained process, though these monoprints have also been pursued as editions. Beginning with Color Field Notes in 2009, Apfelbaum created a portfolio of nine prints that highlight her use of color in a conceptual manner. Inspired by the concepts of George Field, a chemist from the 18^th and 19^th century that specialized in chromatics, in Color Field Notes seven woodblock prints surround a screenprint of Field's 'color-circle' that appeared in his book Chromatics. Field expands the common primary colors of blue, red, and yellow, to include the secondary colors orange, purple, and green. The dominant color of each woodblock print in the portfolio correlates to Field's primary colors, with the additional gray and brown, revolving around much like the color-circle itself. Color Field Notes directly references both science and art history, becoming a conceptual analysis of both color field abstraction and chromatics itself.

Apfelbaum’s largest iteration of her Love series are her Love Park monoprints at a monumental 79 x 79 inch scale. She explains: “In my installation work, I like big. The monoprints grew very naturally. We kept upping the ante.” So large they have to be printed on a hydraulic press, these Love Parks consume your eye as you enter into an all-encompassing space. In some Parks, every inch of paper is covered with hundreds of small flowers jam-packed around a massive central flower or cascading down the print. Others leave white space as the flowers seem to creep in, exploding out of the center. Apfelbaum reacts to each new block she places down, creating dynamic compositions of vibrant colors that surround you like a field of flowers.

Though only realized in hindsight, Apfelbaum first used the flower in her work in 1989 when she began drawing the flowers in Andy Warhol’s 1968 work SAS Passenger Ticket, which she then translated into wood in a sculptural piece titled Daisy Chain. The motif has proven to hold so much meaning that Apfelbaum has been able to work with it for over thirty years. Drawing from both art history and life, Apfelbaum sees the flower as a positive force that arrives in the dark. Not only romantic, the flower is also a sign of protest, such as the true ‘flower power’ seen in Bernie Boston’s photograph Flower Power of a protestor placing a carnation in the rifle of a National Guardsman during the 1967 March on the Pentagon. It is a marker for each milestone: a symbol of birth, a sign of love, and present at death – the flower pervades throughout our lives, ephemeral yet powerful.

For more information on Love Series editions and monoprints, or Apfelbaum's other series with Durham Press, please contact us at sales@durhampress.com.