Apfelbaum's work is both painting and sculpture, and perhaps photography and fashion and formless material process as well. Its all these things - wildly so and wildly not so.

Lane Relyea, What Does Love have to Do With It (Catalog) 2003

Polly Apfelbaum has been showing consistently in New York and abroad since her first one-person show in New York 1986. A major mid-career survey of her work opened in 2003 at the Institute for Contemporary Art in Philadelphia. The show traveled through 2004, and a catalogue surveying 15 years of work was published by ICA.

Apfelbaum has held recent solo exhibitions at: Frith Street Gallery, London, (2007); Angles Gallery, Santa Monica, (2007); Solvent Space, Virginia Commonwealth University, Richmond (2007); Galerie Nächst St. Stephan, Vienna, (2005); D'Amelio-Terras Gallery, New York (2005); Contemporary Art Museum, St. Louis, (2004); Triple Candi, New York, (2003); and Massachusetts College of Art, Boston, MA, (2003).

Her work has been featured recently in important group exhibitions including: Comic Abstraction and Lines, Grids, Stains, and Words, both at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, (2007); Pink, Galerie Mirchandani + Steinruecke, Bombay, (2007); Welcoming the Flowers, with John Giorno, Senior & Shopmaker, New York, (2007); Extreme Abstraction, Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, (2005); The Shape of Colour, Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto, (2005); A Kind of Bliss, The Drawing Room, London (2004); Flowers Observed, Flowers Transformed, The Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh (2004); Lodz Biennale, Lodz, Poland, (2004); and The Ideal City, Bienal de Valencia, Spain (2003)

Her work is in the collections of The Museum of Modern of Art, New York; The Whitney Museum of Art of American Art, New York; Brooklyn Museum of Art, New York, The Los Angeles County Museum of Art, CA, Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, NY; The Henry Art Gallery, Seattle, Washington; The Dallas Museum of Art, Dallas, Texas. The artist has received important grants and awards, including a Guggenheim Fellowship; an Academy Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, a Richard Diebenkorn Fellowship; a Joan Mitchell Fellowship; an Artist's Fellowship from the New York Foundation for the Arts; an Anonymous Was a Women Award and a Pollack-Krasner Foundation grant.

Significant group exhibitions from her earlier career include: Sense and Sensibility: Women and Minimalism in the 90's, The Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY, (1995); Painting Outside Painting, 44th Corcoran Painting Biennial, Corcoran Museum of Art, Washington, D.C. (1996); Painting-The Extended Field, Magasin 3, Stockholm, Sweden, (1997); Other, 4th Biennale D'art Contemporain de Lyon, France, curated by Harald Szeemann, (1998); Everyday, 11th Biennale of Sydney, Australia, (1998); Postmark: An Abstract Effect, Site Santa Fe, NM, (1999); Operativo, Museo Rufino Tamayo, Mexico City, Mexico, (2001); Sculpture as Field, Kunstverein Gottingen, Gottingen, Germany, (2001); The Eye of the Beholder, Dundee Contemporary Arts, Dundee, Scotland, (2002); As Painting: Division and Displacement, Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus, OH, (2002)

Upcoming solo exhibitions include: Milton Keynes Gallery, Milton Keynes, UK; Galerie Mirchandani + Steinruecke, Mumbai, India; and the Locks Gallery, Philadelphia, PA.