Ida Applebroog studied at the Institute of Applied Arts and Sciences in New York, followed by the Art Institute of Chicago (1966–1968), a town animated by pictorial traditions other than those of the abstract expressionism of New York. The artist focused on the figure and modes of representation borrowing from different narrative systems—from television to graffiti and comics—all tied into to the trivial world repudiated by pictorial modernism. Her vignettes, sequences, and drawn or painted scenes, dramatized by their setting—a window, a screen, stage curtains, the physical limits of a panel—often addressed the doubts which interfere with the mechanisms of interpersonal communication: silences, holes, gaps, inconsistencies and misunderstandings, which form the reality of a world, “whose meaning is perpetual hemorrhage” (Cussans 2002).

Her career began in 1972 after moving to San Diego where she taught, which allowed her to encounter the artistic feminist movement, which was very widespread on the American West Coast. Upon returning to New York, she exhibited his first series, Galileo Works, at the Women’s Interart Center (1976) and, when she became involved in the journal Heresies: A Feminist Publication on Art and Politics in 1977, began to distribute a series of self-produced books by mail. In 1981, his first solo exhibition at the Ronald Feldman Fine Arts gallery offered a series of “views” drawn in red ink and Rhoplex on Mylar or vellum. These cutout panels depicted dramas—often familial—like sexism, homophobia, anxiety, or isolation creeping silently between half-closed blinds. The artist offers a vision seen surreptitiously, as if in passing. Subsequently, the panels change in size, the painter using the installation to create different methods of figuration, even using various layers of materials, which allowed her to include and represent “all kinds of events put together,” filled with contradictory information, in order to reinterpret reality as a place where there is no boundary between the norm and its overcoming. The artist has participated in numerous international events, including Documenta 8 and 13 in Kassel, Germany in 1987 and 2012 respectively.