Ken Aptekar - Biography

Ken Aptekar is an artist who combines painting with text. He paints new versions of historical paintings and frames, bolting glass with sandblasted words to his painted panels. Aptekar's work belongs to the tradition of painting, yet he brings to that tradition a recognition that paintings produce meaning only through their interaction with viewers. He investigates the nature of spectatorship. By “recreating” works of art in a painterly but utilitarian manner, Aptekar promotes viewers' own narratives prompted by the image-text combinations.

He overlays his own responses to the historical works, too, alongside those of audiences he invites to look at paintings with him in museums. Often his and others' responses would be considered unorthodox in a traditional museum or gallery setting—the sort you think but don't say. Yet when engraved in glass and seen in a work of art, the comments lend an encouraging legitimacy to viewers' own particular responses. Recently, Aptekar has started producing videos in addition to painting. The videos continue his efforts to bring contemporary points of view to the history of art.

Born in Detroit, Michigan, in 1950, Aptekar received his BFA at the University of Michigan, then moved to Brooklyn in 1973 to complete an MFA at Pratt Institute (1975). His work has been seen in solo exhibitions at The Victoria & Albert Museum (London), The Corcoran Gallery of Art (Washington, DC), Memorial Art Gallery (Rochester, NY), Musée Robert Dubois-Corneau (Brunoy, France), Espace d'Art Contemporain Camille Lambert (Juvisy, France), The New Museum (NY), Palmer Museum at Penn State, Cummer Museum (Jacksonville, FL), the Contemporary Art Center of Virginia, and the Elaine Jacob Gallery at Wayne State University in Detroit.

A survey exhibition of his work, Ken Aptekar: Painting Between the Lines, 1990-2000, organized by the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art in Kansas City, completed its tour in the United States in 2002. Solo gallery exhibitions include Bernice Steinbaum Gallery (Miami), Pamela Auchincloss Projects, Steinbaum Krauss Gallery, Jack Shainman Gallery, and Bess Cutler Gallery (all in NYC). Aptekar's first solo exhibition with the James Graham & Sons Gallery/JG Contemporary in New York took place in May-June, 2006. Currently, Aptekar's work can be seen in New York at the Rubin Museum of Art in "The Missing Peace: Artists Consider the Dalai Lama."

Numerous group exhibitions include Beyond the Mountains: The Contemporary American Landscape , Too Jewish? Challenging Traditional Identities, The Perpetual Well: Contemporary Art from the Collection of The Jewish Museum , Going for Baroque at the Walters Gallery in Baltimore, Bad Girls (West) at UCLA, and The Other Man at The New Museum.

Aptekar is the recipient of two NEA Fellowships in Painting, a Mid-Atlantic Arts Foundation Award, a Rockefeller Residency at Bellagio, Djerassi Resident Artist Program residencies, and a Pollock-Krasner Foundation Award.

Among the museum collections in which Aptekar's work can be found are the Jewish Museum (NY), the Corcoran Gallery of Art, the Victoria and Albert Museum (London), the Denver Art Museum, the National Museum of American Art, the Kemper Museum, and the Contemporary Art Trust (UK), and in numerous private and institutional collections.

Aptekar lives with the writer Eunice Lipton and divides his time between Paris and New York.