Paul La Mantia

Paul Christopher Lamantia (born 1938) is an American visual artist, known for paintings and drawings that explore dark psychosexual imagery. He studied at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and emerged in the 1960s and 1970s as part of the larger group of artists known as the Chicago Imagists.

Lamantia often depicts surreal, distorted figures in transgressive scenarios, rendered in a formally structured, dizzying patterns, line and high-key color; he has been influenced by Expressionism, High Renaissance and Baroque art, and psychoanalytic theory. Art historian Robert Cozzolino suggests his work implies imply multiple levels of meaning: allegories of lust, confessional hallucinations about sexual anxiety, visions from an altered state. whose work "challenges and wrenches" the limits of acceptability and taste, while Franz Schulze described him as one of the city's "most brutal and coldly expressionist" figurative artists. and major newspapers. His work has been shown at the Art Institute of Chicago and Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago and sits in their permanent collections, as well as those of the Smithsonian American Art Museum and Milwaukee Art Museum, among many. Lamantia lives and works in Chicago.thumb Paul Lamantia, Like Father Like Son, mixed media, 31 1/8"x 41 5/16", 1968, Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts collection.

Life and career Lamantia was born Walter Zombek in Chicago, Illinois in 1938, and adopted by Joseph and Nellie Lamantia at age two. His early visual education included underground comics, museum trips with his mother, his father's collection of 1940s soft-core porn and girlie culture novelties, and a 14-week scholarship he won to study drawing at the Art Institute of Chicago. As a teenager, he studied under advertising artist Jules Zinni, intending to become a commercial illustrator.

After his service, Lamantia took night classes at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC) and resumed advertising work, but soon elected to pursue a fine art career. Lamantia exhibited in shows at the city's key poles of artistic influence, the Art Institute of Chicago ("Chicago and Vicinity," 1962, 1964, 1965) and the Illinois Institute of Technology ("The Sunken City Rises," 1964; "Phalanx," 1965). In 1964, after taking additional education courses at the University of Chicago, he earned a BFA, followed by an MFA in 1968. Artists Space, New York ("Recent Art from Chicago," 1986), Figge Art Museum ("Chicago Imagism: A 25-Year Survey," 1994), and MCA Chicago ("Art in Chicago 1945–1995"). emotional impact; 2) pushing of form and subject matter to aesthetic and psychological extremes; and 4) outsider status beyond mainstream critical categories, which has led some to classify him as an Art brut artist. In terms of chronology and psychology, critics write that he "hovers at the edge" of the Chicago Imagists, sharing themes of sex, aggression, and psychological menace and a tendency towards vernacular expression. Critics Peter Frank and Hawkins concur, describing his work as rawer than the Imagists, with cartooniness a "wrapper for something scarier, less aesthetic and polite." Lamantia set his scenes in garish, compressed domestic interiors that recall the harrowing rooms of Francis Bacon and Max Beckmann. Lamantia's figuration also evolved towards an H.P. Lovecraftian, sci-fi-like "mechano-morphism," James Yood called the work a "strangely hypnotic" catalogue of unmediated male desire "immersed in sheer pictorial thrill."

Critics hold that the drawings, while thematically similar, are neither tangential nor mere studies, but autonomous, open-ended works that explore oneiric, metaphysical and visionary pursuits with a searing, concentrated energy. Cozzolino, and others, consider the drawings to be among the least well-known, understudied bodies of work among artists of Lamantia's generation. Milwaukee Art Museum, Contemporary Museum, Honolulu, Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, Brauer Museum of Art, Smart Museum of Art, Mary and Leigh Block Museum of Art, Minneapolis Institute of Art, The Playboy Collection, Illinois State Museum, DePaul Art Museum, Ukrainian Institute of Modern Art, and Wright Museum of Art, among others. In 1984, he was recognized with the Art Institute of Chicago's Logan Prize.