Feminine Mapping (but it's not her world), 2022. Mixed media and collage on canvas, 70 x 60.

Portrait Society Gallery of Contemporary Art (PSG) is thrilled to present a solo exhibition of work by Phyllis Bramson. This prestigious Chicago-based  artist and teacher is an influential presence whose long career is sometimes associated with the Chicago Imagist group.  The exhibition, “Relationships: Anywhere They Take Me,” runs June 10 to August 5, 2023. An opening reception with the artist is from 3 to 5 p.m. Saturday, June 10 with an informal discussion at 4 p.m. 

Bramson’s lavish paintings are part fairytale and part Rococo exultation that linger over the foibles of love and seduction. She works intuitively, building compositions piece by piece with painted passages and elements of collage. Patterns that might seem jarring interact with a lively coherence as she places her protagonists in ornamental settings. Her stories of love and intrigue are timeless and placeless. Borders are eradicated as Bramson frees myth and lore from points of origin and weaves new universal threads. Iconic figures such as a princess, a clown, a snowman, the maiden, or Rapunzel wander through her works, often meeting in paintings where they might not belong — as if they fell into the wrong story. Think of Pinnochio appearing on a page of a Grimm’s tale. This process of compilation and assimilation distinguishes Bramson’s work. She has developed remarkable finesse within this ever-expanding vocabulary of appropriation.

Critic Lori Waxman, in the Chicago Tribune, described Bramson’s 2016 retrospective at the Chicago Cultural Center as “a glorious whirlwind of excess, kitsch and desire. Bramson is a maximalist of materials and cultures, from the rococo paintings of Fragonard to the happy buddhas of Chinese restaurants and the plaster gnomes of tacky gardens. Via techniques of bricolage, she escorts these interracial, high-low, anachronistic members into delicately comedic menages that seem to have as their main principle the act of saying yes.”

Portrait Society is presenting a suite of recent paintings as well as several sculptures and drawings. Long a fan of her work, Gallery Director Debra Brehmer said, “We are ecstatic and honored to host this work. I admire Phyllis for her commitment to working with tropes that could fall into the category of ‘feminine’, a risky proposition over decades of an exclusionary art world. As all of that is now changing, Phyllis’ work is more relevant and more timely than ever. It is almost an encyclopedia of what the male-driven art world had deemed unworthy as subjects — love, domesticity, and the fluid realm between high and low expressions. She fuses art discourse with patterns from wallpaper or objects from the nicknack shelf with immensely sophisticated orchestration, honoring the cultural continuities that turn monuments into paper weights.”

Biography

Phyllis Bramson is the recipient of three National Endowments, a Senior Fulbright Scholar, a Louis Comfort Tiffany Grant, a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Rockefeller Foundation Grant, a 2004 Artadia: The Fund for Art and Dialogue Jury Award and a 2009 Anonymous Was a Woman Award.

She has been in more than 30 one-person exhibitions, including The New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York; Boulder Art Museum; the Renaissance Society at the University of Chicago (mid-career survey); The Rockford Art Museum; and The Chicago Cultural Center (retrospective 1995-2016), and the Lubeznik Center for the Arts. Group exhibitions include Seattle Art Museum; Art Institute of Chicago; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; Smart Museum; Renwick Museum; and the Corcoran Museum’s 43rd Painting Biennial.

Bramson lives and paints in Chicago and has been advising painting and drawing graduate students at the School of the Art Institute at Chicago since 2007. She was awarded Professor Emerita from the University of Illinois, Chicago in 2007.