Polly Apfelbaum came to international recognition with installations of what later became her signature material and technique: hundreds of pieces of hand-cut dyed velvet, placed on a floor in highly organized patterns of shape and color. Apfelbaum’s installation Flying Hearts, exhibited in HOVER, evokes qualities inherent in Islamic art, patchwork quilts, and kitschy black-velvet paintings.

Pae White’s dense paper and string mobiles give a nod to Alexander Calder’s mobiles, as well as Marimekko’s organic textile designs, but could also be seen as “paintings in space”-dense color fields recalling pointillism, pixels, or camouflage patterns. 

With a textile work resting on the floor and a paper mobile hanging nearby, HOVER: Polly Apfelbaum and Pae White explored connections between two contemporary artists whose work revels in its hybridism, fragility, and extreme beauty. Both works have a strong sense of spectacle and movement, consisting of hundreds of fragments that make up a whole. While neither work is a painting, each refers to the language of painting.