Phyllis Bramson
Phyllis Bramson (born 1941) is an American artist, based in Chicago and known for "richly ornamental, excessive and decadent" paintings[1] described as walking a tightrope between "edginess and eroticism.
"[2] She combines eclectic influences, such as kitsch culture, Rococo art and Orientalism, in juxtapositions of fantastical figures, decorative patterns and objects, and pastoral landscapes that affirm the pleasures and follies of romantic desire, imagination and looking.
[7][17][18] After getting married, she and her husband settled in Glenview, Illinois in 1966; Bramson found work as a window designer, creating the highly visible, theatrical displays downtown at Marshall Field's, then Chicago's most prominent department store.
After graduating, she helped co-found Artemisia Gallery with artists including Margaret Wharton, Mary Stoppert, Joy Poe, Barbara Grad, Phyllis McDonald, and Vera Klement.
Her attraction to pattern, beauty and sensuality was formed by youthful experiences in her home of Chinoiserie (the Western decorative imitation of East Asian artistic traditions), kitsch objects, and 1950s girlie magazines and calendars.
"[19] Both she and critics have noted her shared interest in expressive figuration and theatrical spaces with the city's "Monster Roster" artists of the 1950s, such as Robert Barnes, Ellen Lanyon and Irving Petlin (sometimes called "Magic Realists"), Seymour Rosofsky, and June Leaf.
[7][28][29] Critics also note similarities to the more well-known Chicago Imagists, in her work's immediacy, vernacular references and unnerving poetics, but generally conclude that it differs in its more personal, lyrical, dream-like and inward orientation.
Writer Joanna Frueh places Bramson in the "romantic Individualist" tradition of intense feeling, love-longing, alienation and morality, and considers artmaking and sex—including "the voluptuousness, risks, temptations and delights attendant on both themes"—as the implicit, twin subjects of her work.
"[33] Lynne Warren suggests that while her work looks nostalgically to a time in which longing and desire were satisfied in a slow, tension-filled unfolding, it also contains social commentary and political critique "that fully inhabit today's reality.
She explored ceramic, pastel, objects, fans, beads, sequins, glitter and fabric, fashioning doll-like, sculptural portraits, mixed media drawings, and assemblages that some suggest were influenced by her window display work at Marshall Field's.
[28][21] She combines those effects with a decorative impulse using lively patterning, which connects and unifies disparate compositional elements,[30] and creates the "rhythmic dynamism,"[37] musicality, and frenetic energy in her paintings.
"[41] Finally, critics note her Surrealist sense of juxtaposition and spatial ambiguity, including a freewheeling approach to reality where abstract and figurative are often interchangeable, creating a context of danger, disorientation and flux.
[28] Within them, she would orchestrate a growing personal iconography, both familiar and bizarre: performer-exhibitionists, flamboyant costumes and accoutrements, theatrical objects (masks, globes, vases, swords, pillars) and exotic settings.
[1] Her dreamlike, emotionally charged vignettes implied archetypal, yet open-ended, relational scenarios, with contorted figures clinging to masts, bending over backwards, or paddling as waves swirled around sinking boats.
[47][37] In these new configurations, Bramson re-coded banal or sweet imagery through juxtaposition and association in order to express, variously, female physicality, sensuous pleasure, a reclaiming of kitsch, and a sense of cultural apprehension.
"[52][53] The show included artists such as Nicholas Africano, Bramson herself, Susanne Doremus, Richard Hull, Michiko Itatani, Paul Lamantia, Jim Lutes, David Sharpe, Hollis Sigler, and Mary Lou Zelazny, among others.
[54][55] The late critic James Yood (in whose memory the exhibition was dedicated) was among those who championed this group, which both built on, and sought to break free from, the Imagist legacy through more emotionally immediate and introspective explorations of the human condition that in formal terms were more painterly, compositionally open, and spatially expansive.
