Brenda Zlamany

Zlamany first attracted notice for meticulously rendered paintings of animal carcasses (birds, blowfish, snakes, sharks, iguanas), isolated and floating ambiguously in dark, painterly abstract fields (e.g., Shark Head #2, 1992).[31][8][32] She began this work in the mid-1980s as a way to connect to visceral experience and elements of art practice—painting, craft, beauty—that she felt women were discouraged from pursuing.[28] Reviewers noted her mastery of academic glazing techniques, delicate sense of color and texture, and paint application suggestive of both Old Master and Abstract Expressionist technique;[27][4][9][41] in psychological terms, they described the paintings as "disquietingly seductive,"[42] vaguely allegorical, icon-like contemplations of life, death, desire and spirituality.[43][44][45][46] Janine Cirincione wrote that they "teeter on the edge of abstraction and representation, old master bravura and postmodern theory, between the seductive and the gruesome," with freewheeling art historical borrowings that challenged both traditional pictorial values and contemporary negations of representational work.[8] Barry Schwabsky likewise noted the work's conceptual preference for investigating materiality and illusionism and art's "half-feared, half-desired" fascination with representation and beauty over realism.[4][28] In a later series, Zlamany painted posed, live snakes that emphasized linear decoration, pattern and male sexuality while subverting traditional cultural associations of snakes with the feminine.[13][44][11]

Brenda Zlamany, Self-Portrait with Benedict and Oxfordshire, oil on panel, 26" x 17", 1998.

In 1992, Zlamany painted her first human portrait and exhibited it alongside animal still lifes, interested in how the out-of-fashion genre would be received.[4] Positive response inspired her 1994 show, "Twelve Men and Twelve Birds," a deadpan pairing of dead bird and artist portraits (including Chuck Close, Glenn Ligon, Gary Stephan).[12][47][13] Writers described them as terse, moody, glowing likenesses that emerged from velvety black, reflective backgrounds and emphasized composition, surface and volume rather than personality or photographic reproduction.[43][48][49][50][51] Her 1995 show at Sabine Wachters featured portraits of the gallery's other artists—generally middle-aged, bald, male conceptual artists—that Guy Gilsoul called meticulously painted, inaccessible "mixtures of attraction, and repulsion, fascination and aversion."[47] In conceptual terms, critics such as Robert C. Morgan deemed this work a provocative deconstruction that coaxed "exemplars of art world virility"[13] into a passive role in order to glimpse male reality and sexual and power dynamics, reversing centuries of objectification of female subjects.[12][52] John Yau described them as possessing a "disturbing eroticism" sealed off in dark anonymous space and embalming glazes that dissolved the subjects' power.[11]

Brenda Zlamany, Portrait #46 (Red Chuck), oil on linen on panel, four panels, each 24" x 24", 2000–01.

In the late 1990s and 2000s, Zlamany, continued painting portraits of male artists and other public figures,[53][17][14] while expanding her practice to include a wider range of figurative subjects[33][7][37] and a series of Southeast Asian landscapes.[41][54] Her multi-paneled "Color Studies" works configured monochrome panels and portraits (of Chuck Close, Evander Holyfield, and John Yau) mixed figuration and abstraction, riffing on modernist color theory, rectangles (e.g., the boxing ring), negative space, and Close's use of repetition and the grid.[55][34][54] They emphasized the minimal nature of Zlamany's work, which had long eschewed architecture and landscape elements and iconographic cues in favor of composition, proportion, ground color and manner of representation as means of conveying narrative or psychological content.[34][54][37] During this time, Zlamany also produced portraits of artists Leonardo Drew, David Humphrey, David Hockney, and Alex Katz among others; the latter two were National Portrait Gallery competition selections.[17][53][14]

In 1998, Zlamany painted portraits of her pregnant sister and two sets of self-portraits, one nude and one in profiled poses recalling works by della Francesca; her 2007 show "Facing Family" featured portraits of her parents and daughter.[56][33][7] Critics such as Donald Kuspit continued to note her confrontation with representational conventions and Old Master technique and devices in these works and the later Self-Portrait with Oona nursing (2003–4), a stark contemporary rendering of the Madonna and Child motif.[19][33][40] They also noted her ability in these works to create narrative, context and inner presence.[7][19]

Zlamany's international, multiyear project, "The Itinerant Portraitist" (2011– ), explores portraiture focused on nontraditional subjects: indigenous communities in Taipei, orphaned Emirati girls, taxicab drivers in Cuba, and nursing home residents in the Bronx.[15][57][16] The series began with a Fulbright Grant-supported project in which she painted 888 watercolor portraits from direct observation of people in remote Taiwan, accompanied by her daughter, Oona, who is fluent in Mandarin;[18][15] it was realized in the multimedia installation, "888: Portraits in Taiwan" (exhibited in Taipei and New York, 2012).[18] In 2017, Zlamany painted 100 elderly residents of the Hebrew Home in the Bronx using a camera lucida; that work was exhibited at the Derfner Judaica Museum and documented in the collaborative video, 100/100 (2019, with composer Aaron Jay Kernis), which played several film festivals and won the Best Documentary Short prize at the Greenpoint Film Festival.[16][2][58]

Brenda Zlamany, Yale's First Women Ph.Ds., 1894, oil on linen on panel, 72" x 59", 2016. Yale University commission, permanently installation, Sterling Memorial Library.

Zlamany has received portrait commissions from individuals, The New York Times Magazine, and institutions such as the World Bank and Yale University, among others.[7][38] She produced portraits of Osama bin Laden (cover),[59] Slobodan Milosevic and Mirjana Marković,[60] Marian Anderson,[61] and Jeffrey Dahmer for special issues of The New York Times Magazine.[62] She won a national competition for her first Yale commission, Yale's First Women Ph.Ds., 1894 (2015), which commemorates the first seven women to earn Ph.D. degrees at the university.[20][26] The painting involved extensive research on the women and late-19th century costuming, hairstyles and objects; its composition was developed through the use of paper cutouts of the women in various poses and relationships.[26][20][24] The Davenport Dining Room Scene (2018) is a two-canvas group portrait of a departing college dean among a mix of eight professors, students, and university employees of the university that he had formed friendships with during several decades at the school.[24] In 2023, Yale commissioned Zlamany to paint the portrait of Elga Ruth Wasserman, who led the effort in 1972 to include the first cohort of women undergraduates and to facilitate coeducation.[63]