Chicago-based Phyllis Bramson is known for her richly ornamental, excessive, and decadent paintings. She is greatly inspired by 18th century Rococo and Chinoiserie, along with Chinese Pleasure Garden paintings and the French painters Boucher and Fragonard. The narratives in Bramson’s paintings remain incomplete, telling an open-ended story and resembling tropes concerning romantic folly. Her canvases are used as a repository for feelings, which often collide and intermingle between the personal and a grander narrative.

She is a key voice of her generation, was a long-time professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago in addition to advising graduate students in drawing and painting at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Her work has been exhibited in key exhibitions and surveys at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Smithsonian Institution, and Corcoran Gallery of Art, among many institutions. She has had more than forty solo shows at venues such as the New Museum, New York; the Renaissance Society, Chicago; Chicago Cultural Center; Fort Wayne Museum of Art; Boulder Art Museum; University of West Virginia Museum; and numerous galleries.

Bramson has been covered widely and recognized with numerous awards. She is the recipient of three National Endowments, a Senior Fulbright Scholarship, Louis Comfort Tiffany Grant, Guggenheim Fellowship, Rockefeller Foundation Grant, Artadia Award, Anonymous Was A Woman Award, and selected as one of the Women’s Caucus for Art Lifetime Achievement Awardees for 2014.