CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 4/3/2017

Ida Applebroog: Mercy Hospital

What a book! Gorgeous reproductions; paper changes; linen binding; collage works using texts by Kafka and Freud; The Yellow Wall-Paper… Ida Applebroog: Mercy Hospital—published to accompany an acclaimed 2016 exhibition at ICA Miami, which has traveled to New York and opens tonight at Karma—collects the dark, often scary and psychedelic-seeming drawings that Applebroog made while institutionalized at Mercy Hospital in 1969, post-nervous breakdown. Recently rediscovered by the artist's assistants in a box that hadn't been opened for 50 years, the drawings "allowed Applebroog to draw herself back to life, back to herself, leading from catastrophic breakdown to a creative, personal and political breakthrough," in the words of essayist Jo Applin.