PHYLLIS BRAMSON – UNDER THE PLEASURE DOME

Posted on 2016-05-23

Phyllis Bramson is an enigmatic and influential artist and professor in the Chicago art world. Her lush colors, coy figuration and wholehearted embrace of the decorative in the service of masterfully composed assemblages and paintings, that draw the viewer ever further in to many layered stories are continuous threads in her decades long practice of artmaking and teaching. Bramson’s use of kitsch objects, erotic overtones and Orientalist references creates lightly veiled, deeply complex works. The Chicago Cultural Center’s exhibition “Under the Pleasure Dome” is a wide selection of paintings and assemblages drawn from the artist’s collection and illustrative of her work over many years including examples of her most recent “scroll” series.

“Flirting with the psychosexual subconscious of Americana objects, winking at conventions of ‘good taste,’ and pinching at the backside of our public facades of normalcy: Bramson’s aesthetic is that of the bawdy banal. It is sentimental, and it is smart. Through iconography and innuendo Bramson searches for, and somehow depicts, complex worlds of desire, emotion, and curiosity that cultural fantasy, industry, and kitsch-commodity (or, in other words: post-modernity) have conspired to make possible”.

Danny Orendorff, independent curator and art critic

Opposite – Pastoral Pleasures, 2006

Exhibition runs through till August 28th, 2016

Chicago Cultural Center
78 East Washington Street
Chicago, IL60602

www.cityofchicago.org