Fickle Ways

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Phyllis Bramson, who is noted for her use of patterning and lush decoration, describes her work as “infused with lighthearted arbitrariness and amusing anecdotes about love and affection, in an often cold and hostile world.” Bramson creates compositions that are informed by sources as diverse as French Rococo art, Chinese paintings of pleasure gardens and Surrealism. Encounters between the sexes, offering ambiguous, deliberately incomplete narratives, are a recurring theme for the artist. In the catalogue accompanying the Carl Hammer Gallery exhibition in which Fickle Ways was featured, Bramson comments that her “visual strategy is a Surrealistic gesture, an uncanny staccato of sentances [sic] and lists . . . all revolving around ruminations about disordered cosmology.” She also speaks of “the quite unconscious way I employ pictorial elements. For some time now, I have wondered why my paintings stubbornly remain tied to some form of narration (but never a story of a theatrical plot line). Always struggling against banality, the paintings project unrelenting psychic realism (involving desire and loss) which hovers between the nonsensical and the profoundly meaningful. Mark Soppeland notes that Bramson told him that the collage elements were cut from thrift store paintings and that the artist spoke at the time about trying to address the challenges associated with large areas of negative space. --AAM Curatorial