DALIA RAMANAUSKAS

DALIA RAMANAUSKAS PLAYING REALITY

DALIA RAMANAUSKAS: playing reality

Essay by Estera Milman

I have spent much of my life spinning straw into gold.

What I do is confront the changes in our outdoor and indoor environment[s]... A sort of reverse archeology – recycling our cast-offs, even as we are throwing them away…
Dalia Ramanauskas

Dalia Ramanauskas is best known for her prowess as a master draftswoman. She has an impressive record of one person exhibitions and group shows and her works on paper are housed in myriad public, private and corporate collections. In April 1974, Artforum posited that the artist transformed functionless objects into “repositories of meaning.” It has also been noted that Ramanauskas is dedicated to ennobling the trivial and that her drawings deal “with the flotsam and jetsam of American society.” (Rita Gonzales, The New York Times, August 4, 1996.) Similar concerns inform the artist’s new body of work on linen and canvas, a cross-section of which is currently on view in the Amarillo Museum of Art’s galleries.

Although the current exhibition, Dalia Ramanauskas: Playing Reality, marks the public debut of this new series, Ramanauskas is neither an ingénue nor a newcomer to the shifting, and often disputed, yet perpetually fluid, epicenters of the North American art scene. For example, on Sunday, March 14, 1965, four of her meticulously executed and complex works on paper were lent by the Amel Gallery to the group show “POP AND CIRCUMSTANCE: New York’s largest showing of pop art.” The company she kept during this exhibition was indeed diverse and included Richard Artschwager, Allan D’Arcangelo, Robert Indiana, Leo Jensen, Jasper Johns, Alex Katz, Roy Lichtenstein, Claes Oldenburg, Mel Ramos, Robert Rauschenberg, James Rosenquist, Andy Warhol, Robert Watts and Tom Wesselmann, among a host of others. However, despite the proclamation published by the organizers of POP AND CIRCUMSTANCE, Ramanauskas was never a card carrying member of the Pop Art circle. Instead, she was chronologically ahead of the art historical curve.

In March, 1971, the one person show, DALIA RAMANAUSKAS: Super-Real Drawings, opened at the Allan Stone Gallery on 48 East 86 Street, New York City, at a point in time when Photo-Realism had begun to challenge the hegemony of Pop. Three years later, Peter Frank, the cultural critic and occasional fellow traveler in the Fluxus collective, posited the following, in a review of Ramanauskas’ January 1974 one woman show at the Hundred Acres Gallery on West Broadway: “This work, which Ramanauskas has been doing for at least a decade, is closer to Magic Realism – the exquisite imitation of reality – rather than Photographic Realism, which reproduces a reproductive medium” (On Art, Soho Weekly News, January 24, 1974). While Frank’s observation was clearly right on target, by 1977, when her work was hung at OK Harris, there was little question that Ramanauskas had been positioned firmly within the ranks of what was then understood to be the more broadly based, new “American Realists.” That such was indeed the case is confirmed by the fact that in September of that year, when the five person show, Aspects of Realism was mounted at the Young Hoffman Gallery in Chicago, her drawings were exhibited alongside works by Sylvia Mangold, Don Nice, Paul Sarkisian, and Wayne Thiebaud.

Ramanauskas’ current exhibition at AMoA provides the Amarillo public with premier access to what she informally calls her “dolls.” The artist understands these old and battered models for her paintings to be “dead surrogates for people” and her role as one where she is empowered to breathe life into these once much loved, sometimes battered and always discarded, play things. The resulting images are sometimes unnerving, sometimes spooky and, according to Ramanauskas, sometimes playful. But there is something far more complex here at play. In her realization of these masterfully rendered canvases, the artist has assumed the roles of both grand puppeteer and artworld theatre director. She has constructed a classical proscenium stage and then “transmogrified” her players. Furthermore, the goings on are, for the most part, dialogues with artworld icons. It is to the artist’s credit, however, that her plays are always accessible, on one level or another, to both insiders fluent in art-speak and receivers who are quite happy to remain outside this overtly hierarchical arena.

Dalia Ramanauskas: Playing Reality was curated by Estera Milman, the recipient of six National Endowment for the Arts grants in the not-for-profit sector. The author currently serves as Director of Contemporary, Stephen Foster Fine Arts (www.stephenfosterfinearts.com). The firm represents all of Dalia Ramanauskas new works on linen and canvas.

DALIA RAMANAUSKAS: playing reality was generously sponsored an Anonymous Gift, Sybil B. Harrington Exhibition Trust, and the Texas Commission of the Arts

Essay Images Credit-Lines:

Figure 1
Bather II, 2009
Oil on linen mounted on panel
54 x 48 inches
©2010 Artwork images are copyright of the artist

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