Sep 8th 2017

Opulent Flim-Flam

@ Zolla/Lieberman Gallery

325 W Huron St Chicago, IL 60654

Opening Friday, September 8th, from 5:30PM - 8PM

On view through Saturday, October 21st

Phyllis Bramson
Opulent Flim-Flam
September 8 – October 21, 2017

Zolla/Lieberman Gallery is pleased to present Phyllis Bramson’s solo exhibition “Opulent Flim-Flam” opening September 8, reception from 5:30 – 8:00 p.m.

Phyllis Bramson’s lush colors, coy figuration and wholehearted embrace of the decorative – are in the service of often complexly composed paintings and collages that draw the viewer ever further into many layered stories that have no ending.

Mining such popular cultural sources as Rococo, cartoons, Chinese pleasure gardens, uber decorative greeting cards and childhood fairy tales, Bramson produces vibrant, phantasmagorical paintings that intertwine deeply personal associations with a decidedly kitsch sensibility. The resulting works offer sensual and provocative musings on the nature of private fantasy, cultural appropriation, folly and the peccadillos of love.

“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 is a writer and curator in New York City where he currently works as Manager of Public and Community Engagement Programs for the Museum of Arts and Design.

Phyllis Bramson is Professor Emerita of studio arts at the University of Illinois at Chicago, and advises painting and drawing MFA students at the School of Art Institute of Chicago. She is the recipient of three National Endowments, a Tiffany Award, a Senior Fulbright Scholar, a Guggenheim Fellowship, Anonymous Was A Woman Award, and was selected as one of the Women’s Caucus for Art Lifetime Achievement recipients for 2014. Bramson has had over 30 solo exhibitions including those at the Chicago Cultural Center; The Renaissance Society; The New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York; and the Boulder Art Museum. Bramson lives and works in Chicago.

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