Image: Ida Applebroog, The Ethics of Desire (Study), 2012. Ink, tape and vellum on paper. Courtesy the Estate of Ida Applebroog, Applebroog Industries and Barry Rosen Ltd.
Fruitmarket in Edinburgh will present Ida Applebroog: Portraits from 6 November 2026 to 7 February 2027, a free exhibition devoted to the American artist Ida Applebroog (1929–2023). A public preview takes place on the evening of 5 November, from 6 to 8 pm.
Applebroog, who called herself "a woman artist with feminist concerns", first drew attention in New York during the 1970s with small books she published herself and distributed by post. Her later work became recognisable for pared-down human figures drawn with heavy contour lines and for its sustained attention to power, violence and the place of women in domestic, social and sexual life. Fruitmarket ranks her among the leading feminist artists of her generation.
The show begins with a group from Angry Birds of America, a series of bird portraits made in 2018 from dead specimens, a method the gallery links to eighteenth- and nineteenth-century ornithological illustrators such as John James Audubon and Alexander Wilson, both cited by the artist. The drawings date from Donald Trump's first term as US president, and Fruitmarket quotes Applebroog tracing the series' title to the anger she sensed across the country at the time.
Next comes Ethics of Desire, a group of larger-than-life nude figures printed and painted on thin, translucent mylar and suspended in the gallery. According to Fruitmarket, the series draws both on the advertising imagery that fills city streets and on Plato's reflections on desire; the gallery compares the striding figures, which represent a wide range of bodies, to models on a catwalk or profiles on a dating app.
The exhibition closes with Monalisa, a simple house-like structure covered in a patchwork of drawings made in 2009. They are based on private sketchbooks from 1969, in which Applebroog drew her own body every day for several weeks using a mirror. Fruitmarket presents the piece as an exploration of the tension between self-disclosure and inner life, and between public and private roles.
Taken together, the gallery describes the exhibition as a study of how Applebroog looked at birds, bodies, desire and herself, and of the marks she used to record what she saw. Fruitmarket is at 45 Market Street, Edinburgh, and is open daily from 11 am to 6 pm.
