Brenda Zlamany

Brenda Zlamany, Portrait #138 (David Hockney), oil on panel, 39" x 26", 2014. Brenda Zlamany is an American artist best known for portraiture that combines Old Master technique with a postmodern conceptual approach. She gained attention beginning in the 1990s, when critics such as Artforum 's Barry Schwabsky, Donald Kuspit and John Yau identified her among a small group of figurative painters reviving the neglected legacies of portraiture and classical technique by introducing confrontational subject matter, psychological insight and social critique. Her early portraits of well-known male artists, such as Chuck Close and Leon Golub, reversed conventional artist/sitter gender and power dynamics; her later projects upend the traditionally "heroic" nature of portraiture by featuring underrepresented groups and everyday people.

Zlamany has exhibited at institutions including the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery, Museum of Contemporary Art Taipei, National Museum, Gdańsk, and New-York Historical Society. Her work has been recognized with a Fulbright Fellowship, Pollock-Krasner Foundation Award, and commissions from Yale University, World Bank and The New York Times Magazine, among others; it belongs to public collections such as the Neuberger Museum of Art and Virginia Museum of Fine Arts. She is based in Brooklyn, New York.

Early life and career Brenda Zlamany was born in 1959 in New York City and raised in Queens, New York. and was invited to attend the Yale College Before College Program, where she studied printmaking, painting and anthropology.

In 1984, Zlamany took advantage of a Jerome Foundation Fellowship and moved to New York City, working as a master printer with artists such as Julian Schnabel, Vija Celmins and Sol LeWitt, and making etchings at the Bob Blackburn Printmaking Workshop. After moving to Williamsburg, Brooklyn, she began painting and attracting attention with animal still lifes. Between 1984 and 1994, she was featured in solo exhibitions at Hallwalls and E. M. Donahue Gallery (New York), Sabine Wachters Fine Arts (Brussels) and Galerie Quintessens (Utrecht), in group shows at White Columns, Art in General and Artists Space, and alongside artists including Bruce Nauman and Andy Warhol, in shows at Jack Tilton and Blum Helman. In subsequent years, Zlamany has had solo exhibitions at the Stux and Jessica Fredericks and Museum of Contemporary Art Taipei (2012),

Brenda Zlamany, Shark Head #2, oil on panel, 18" x 14", 1992.

Early animal still lifes 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). in psychological terms, they described the paintings as "disquietingly seductive," vaguely allegorical, icon-like contemplations of life, death, desire and spirituality. 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. 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." John Yau described them as possessing a "disturbing eroticism" sealed off in dark anonymous space and embalming glazes that dissolved the subjects' power. 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. In 2017 she 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. She continued the project in 2018 with her "Climate in America" portraits of Key West and Sonoma wine country residents and diverse Alaskans during a residency in Denali National Park. Slobodan Milosevic and Mirjana Marković, Marian Anderson, and Jeffrey Dahmer for special issues of The New York Times Magazine.

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.

In 2022, The Rockefeller University unveiled Zlamany's commissioned group portrait, Five Trailblazing Women Scientists at The Rockefeller University (2021), which she created after on-campus research into the scientists and their clothing, instruments and furniture. Zlamany was one of three artists selected in 2023 to paint portraits of prominent 19th-century Black abolitionists—in her case William and Martha Brown—for the Great Hall gallery of Mechanics Hall in Worcester, Massachusetts.

Collections and recognition Zlamany has been recognized with a Fulbright Fellowship (2011), awards from the Pollock-Krasner Foundation (2006), Peter S. Reed Foundation (2018) and New York Foundation for the Arts (1994), and artist residencies at Denali National Park, ADAH Abu Dhabi, Ucross Foundation, Yaddo, MacDowell Colony, Millay Colony for the Arts, and Triangle Arts Trust, among others.

Her work belongs to the public art collections of the Cincinnati Art Museum, Deutsche Bank, Neuberger Museum of Art, Museum Kaneko, The Rockefeller University, Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, World Bank and Yale University.