Ken Aptekar

PROVENANCE: Courtesy of the Artist

BREAKING NEWS/FLASH INFO (Perruquier), comes from a portfolio of eleven archival inkjet. They draw on images from plates in the French Encyclopédie (Denis Diderot & Jean le Rond D’Alembert, 1751-) to heighten awareness of rising threats to knowledge-based reasoning, scientific evidence, and to personal freedom in the face of authoritarian manipulations. “Perruquier (“Wigmaker”) has to do with fake hair (!). In the 18th c. Louis XIV popularized the wearing of wigs for men (and women) when his hair prematurely starting thinning out. 

The chyron at the bottom of the print—fashioned as a TV news feed for the “Encyclopedie channel”—refers to a highly publicized trial going on at the time, 1765, of the release of the volume containing the illustrated plates I used for this print. That trial was to decide a lawsuit brought by a slave (“Roc”) against his master (“Poupet”), who had brought him back from the Caribbean to Paris. In the process of winning Roc’s freedom, his lawyer, de Pansey, laid the legal groundwork that led to the abolition of slavery in France only a few years later.

Ken Aptekar is an artist who combines painting with text. He creates works in paint, silverpoint, and digital print media based upon historical paintings and other sources. His paintings and drawings add texts sandblasted on glass and bolted over the images. Born in Detroit in 1950, Aptekar received his BFA at the University of Michigan, then an MFA at Pratt Institute in 1975. His work has been seen in solo museum exhibitions at The Victoria & Albert (London), The Corcoran (Washington, DC), Centro da Cultura Judaica (Sao Paolo, Brazil), The New Museum (NY), Kunsthalle St.-Annen (Lübeck, Germany), Bibliotheque Bussy-Rabutin, (Autun, France), among others, and in numerous gallery and museum exhibitions around the world. 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. Aptekar lives with the writer Eunice Lipton and divides his time between Paris and New York.