PHYLLIS BRAMSON
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Biography
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Feminine Mapping (but it's not her world), 2022
mixed media and collage on canvas 70 x 60 in 177.8 x 152.4 cm |
Phyllis Bramson is a visual storyteller of romantic folly, tragedy, and comedic relief, Bramson is a surrealist painter best known for her maximalist style and cosmic disorder. A self-described “painter-comedian,” Bramson’s palette is a colorful array of beauty, humor, love, and lust. Bramson is a Rococo artist of the present day with an acute awareness for painting’s long history of male-gaze media. Engaging with imagery that depicts women as objects of affection rather than humans of individual agency, Bramson flips this narrative on its head by centering women’s empowerment and pleasure with her erotic anecdotes.
Bramson has been awarded grants and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation (1993), the Rockefeller Foundation Residency/ Grant (1997), and the National Endowment for the Arts (1976 and 1983) Anonymous Was a Woman Award (2004), Selected as one of NewCity magazine’s “Art 50 (2020/ 23): Chicago’s Artists’ Artists”, Louis Comfort Tiffany Grant (1980) among others. She has shown work in galleries and museums in the U.S. and internationally including the New Museum of Contemporary Art in NYC, Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, the Rockefeller Center for Studio Arte in Bellagio, Italy, and The Renaissance Society (Mid-Career Survey). Bramson’s work is part of numerous private and public collections such as The Bronx Museum of Arts, Rhode Island School of Art and Design Museum, the Chazen Museum of Art at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Art Institute of Chicago, Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, Bard College, to name a few. Bramson is Professor Emeritus from the University of Illinois/ Chicago 1985 - 2007 and served as an advisor to MFA students at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago from 2007 - 2023. |
