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 brings these ideas into film, publishing, exhibitions, and participatory encounters. His Agile Cinema® methodology uses iterative processes of production and release to move between fiction and nonfiction, scripted and unscripted situations, and the unpredictable consequences of human exchange. Through The Pioneers, he has developed projects with The Broad Museum, Serpentine Galleries, Marian Goodman Gallery, and Petzel Gallery.

His activities span institutions, publications, organizations, and brands including Harper’s Bazaar, Elle, Vogue, InStyle, L’Officiel, Grazia, Numéro, Critical Inquiry, Hirmer Verlag, Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art, Museum of the African Diaspora, MAK Center for Art and Architecture, Kunstmuseum Bern, Columbus Museum of Art, Singapore Art Museum, Atlanta Art Fair, TRANSFER Gallery, New Museum, The Jewish Federation, Perry Ellis, ASICS, Kids of Immigrants, The Visionaries Agency, TCAmgmt, Kohn Pedersen Fox Associates, FGP Atelier, Rocco Castoro’s SCNR, and Nato Thompson’s The Alternative Art School.

He has engaged artists and cultural figures including Tony Cragg, Ann Hamilton, Pope.L, Mick Jenkins, Snoop Dogg, Adam McKay, Heidi Klum, Diego Boneta, Natalia Reyes, and Zión Moreno.

Appelbaum's solo and two-person exhibitions include Slow Grief I: Foundations and Agile Cinema® at Rusha & Co. in Los Angeles, and an exhibition at Brownstone Gallery in Bangkok. He has participated in group exhibitions including We Breathe the Same Air at Rusha & Co., the Los Angeles Zine and Art Book Bazaar at MaRS Gallery, Gold & White at Paragon and the Mui Lee Boutique in Siam Center with James Dean Company in Bangkok, Morphologies at the Logan Center Gallery at the University of Chicago, and Working Frameworks at Cornell University's Sibley Gallery. He has presented films and performances at Et al. Books with Kristin Bauer, TRANSFER Gallery in association with NYU's Integrated Design & Media program, and the Cornell Electroacoustic Music Center at Sage Chapel, McGraw Tower utilizing the Cornell Chimes, and Lincoln Hall.

He has curated We Breathe the Same Air, Slow Grief I: Foundations, and Natalia Pereira: Engine Company 33 at Rusha & Co., as well as Working Frameworks, a multi-venue initiative connecting Cornell University, the Johnson Museum of Art, Ohio State University, and Columbia College Chicago. Collections including the ASU FIDM Museum, Natalia Reyes, and the Honorary Consul General of Austria in Chicago hold his artworks. He has contributed research to The Religious Imagination in Modern and Contemporary Architecture by Renata Hejduk and Jim Williamson, published by Routledge, and Symphonic Poem: The Art of Aminah Brenda Lynn Robinson by Annegrety Nill, associated with the Columbus Museum of Art and Brooklyn Museum. Appelbaum served as Visiting Professor of Architecture and Art in the International Program in Design and Architecture at Chulalongkorn University in Bangkok, Thailand.

Appelbaum earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, a Master of Architecture from Cornell University, and a Master of Fine Arts from the University of Chicago. He lives in Los Angeles and pursues projects internationally.