The artist first came to prominence in the 70s with her “comic strip” works, drawings that aped the formal elements of animation cells but were emptied of all superfluous information. The apparent simplicity of these works acts as a foil for a series of jarring (and often traumatic) mini-narratives that utilize their cultural legibility in order to investigate issues of power, gender, and violence.

Perched somewhere between an examination of the real and an interrogation of manufactured modes of identity, the drawings lay bare the ways in which desire, gender, and beauty are all constructed via a series of discrete cultural assaults.

Though Applebroog is not constrained by any specific medium, she recurrently scavenges the detritus of mass culture for any and all types of information, often taking images from popular magazines and then collaging them into works that investigate the strange relationships between the grotesque and the bereft. For her latest body of work, which will open at Hauser & Wirth New York, Applebroog will present a series of processbased drawings that draw their forms from fashion magazine cut-outs. Perched somewhere between an examination of the real and an interrogation of manufactured modes of identity, the drawings lay bare the ways in which desire, gender, and beauty are all constructed via a series of discrete cultural assaults.

Built upon the bones of the banal, Applebroog’s tableaux are disorienting precisely because they are so familiar. The profound power of these “fashion” illustrations rests in their ability to illuminate the ways in which commerce denies identity at the very same moment that it sells us our own.

Ida Applebroog, The Ethics of Desire, will open at Hauser & Wirth, 511 West 18th Street, New York City, May 14 through July 31, 2015.