Phyllis Bramson

Phyllis Bramson (born 1941) is an American artist, based in Chicago and known for "richly ornamental, excessive and decadent" paintings described as walking a tightrope between "edginess and eroticism."

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.

Bramson shares tendencies with the Chicago Imagists and broader Chicago tradition of surreal representation in her use of expressionist figuration, vernacular culture, bright color, and sexual imagery.

Curator Lynne Warren wrote of her 30-year retrospective at the Chicago Cultural Center, "Bramson passionately paints from her center, so uniquely shaped in her formative years […] her lovely colors, fluttery, vignette compositions, and flowery and cartoony imagery create works that are really like no one else's. Writer Miranda McClintic said that Bramson's works "incorporate the passionate complexity of eastern mythology, the sexual innuendos of soap operas and sometimes the happy endings of cartoons."

Bramson's work has been exhibited in exhibitions and surveys at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago (MCA), the Art Institute of Chicago, the Smithsonian Institution, and Corcoran Gallery of Art.

In more than forty one-person exhibitions, she has shown at the New Museum, Fort Wayne Museum of Art, Boulder Art Museum, University of West Virginia Museum, and numerous galleries.

She has been widely reviewed and recognized with John S. Guggenheim and Rockefeller foundation grants and the Anonymous Was A Woman Award, among others.

Bramson was born in Madison, Wisconsin in 1941 to parents who ran an auto parts wholesale business.

She acknowledges the pull of 1950s conventions of duty, sacrifice and propriety, describing herself as a kind of tourist or voyeur "teetering" between the worlds of her free-spirited, "anything goes" studio life and straight, married suburban life.

Those dichotomies inform the paradoxes noted in her work: sweetness and salaciousness, modesty and exhibitionism, kitsch and art, East and West, disappointment and hope, longing and pleasure.

Aesthetically, she draws from richly visual, wide-ranging sources.

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.

Later inspirations range from Rococo art to the outsider paintings of Henry Darger to the historical tradition of Persian miniatures and pleasure gardens.

Bramson relates strongly to what she calls Chicago's "history of independent artmaking."

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.

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.

Bramson describes herself as bridging the groups: "I have the humor and salaciousness of some of the Imagists, but I want my figure to have a certain reality to it. I don't take too many liberties."

According to the late critic James Yood, "Bramson has pursued what seems an inexhaustible exploration of the inexhaustible wonder of human coupling, its forms, its rituals, its absurdities, its essential and revelatory nature, sometimes its wistfulness and hints of melancholy."

While Bramson has remained remarkably consistent in her exploration of romantic love, her work—once described as "a riddle disguised as a love-letter" —leaves plenty of room for interpretation.

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.

Dennis Adrian suggested that painting was a place for Bramson to explore states of feeling, dreams and fantasies that were otherwise risky, impossible, unacceptable or undesirable.

Bramson seems to agree: "To me, making art is a difficult, intense activity where I can do a lot of things I wouldn't do out in the world. It's an area where I can function on a dangerous and erotic level. I'm sort of watching myself do it."

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."

While Bramson has generally been uncomfortable with strict feminist readings of her work, considering them too confining, writers have identified challenges to the power dynamics of relationships and societal structure in her work.

In the late 1960s, she taught at the Chicago Academy of Art and Columbia College and enrolled at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where she earned an MFA in 1973.

After graduating, she helped co-found Artemisia Gallery with artists including Margaret Wharton, Mary Stoppert, Joy Poe, Barbara Grad, Phyllis McDonald, and Vera Klement.

She earned a BFA in Drawing and Painting from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (1962) and an MA in Painting at the University of Wisconsin (1964), where she created paintings influenced by the Bay Area Figurative Movement.

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.

Her work can be divided into three main bodies: sculptural and mixed media work (1970s); mixed-media paintings and bas reliefs (1980– ); and three-dimensional works (2006– ).

Bramson assimilates eccentric, diverse social and visual influences.

In the mid-1980s, Bramson gained recognition for her paintings through solo exhibitions at the New Museum and Monique Knowlton Gallery in New York City, the Marianne Deson and Dart galleries (Chicago), Gallerie Farideh Cadot (Paris), and a mid-career survey at Chicago's Renaissance Society (1986).

She also appeared in major group shows at the MCA, Art Institute of Chicago, Madison Art Center, and Hyde Park Art Center.

In 1985, Bramson joined the art faculty at the University of Illinois in Chicago, teaching until 2007, when she retired as Professor Emerita.

Throughout that time, she exhibited regularly at Phyllis Kind, Carl Hammer, Printworks and Zolla/Lieberman in Chicago, and Littlejohn Contemporary and Claire Oliver in New York, among others.

She was one of the founding members of the early women's art collaborative Artemisia Gallery and a long-time professor at the School of Art and Design at the University of Illinois at Chicago, until retiring in 2007.

Since 2007, she has advised MFA students at the School of the Art Institute and continues to work in Chicago.

Bramson has worked in painting, drawing, collage and assemblage.

Her approach, influences and themes, however, have remained relatively consistent.

She works intuitively, without plans or sketches, an organic process she describes as "wayward" and "free fall."

"My studio is a place for bricolage. It's roiling with stuff in bins, on shelves, on the floor. The putting together of this stuff is basically is a mystery to me," she has said.