Saul Appelbaum

Saul Appelbaum is an artist, director, writer, and independent curator based in Los Angeles. Painting anchors his practice. He reconstitutes its meaning and conditions of existence through encounters with people, objects, space, time, and systems of communication. Drawing on thirty years of paintings, drawings, and collages, he couples painting with film, publishing, and participatory media through processes that continually transform their relationships, extending painting beyond its substrate.

His ongoing counter-archive brings together thousands of physical artworks, eleven scrolls, a monumental accumulation of paintings and fragments, and approximately 2.2 million digital files recomposed into 2,200 images. He continually dismantles, rearranges, and redistributes these materials across physical and digital forms, connecting the intimate gestures of painting to the everyday technologies of communication: photographs, emails, text messages, and the internet. Nothing exists alone. Paintings and images acquire new lives as they circulate. Each encounter changes what came before it. An image can transform the painting from which it originated.

As Founding Director of The Pioneers, Appelbaum has developed projects with The Broad Museum, Serpentine Galleries, Marian Goodman Gallery, and Petzel Gallery, alongside creative initiatives for Perry Ellis, Vogue, Harper’s Bazaar, and other international organizations. His exhibitions include Agile Cinema® and We Breathe the Same Air at Rusha & Co., Morphologies at the University of Chicago, and Working Frameworks at Cornell University. He has presented films and performances with TRANSFER Gallery and NYU's Integrated Design & Media program, and at the Cornell Electroacoustic Music Center, incorporating Sage Chapel, McGraw Tower's Cornell Chimes, and Lincoln Hall. His artworks are held in collections including the ASU FIDM Museum. Formerly Visiting Professor of Architecture and Art at Chulalongkorn University in Bangkok, he holds degrees from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Cornell University, and the University of Chicago.