Paul Lamantia

Paul Christopher Lamantia (born 1938) is an American visual artist, known for paintings and drawings that study dark psychosexual imagery. He studied at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and emerged in the 1960s and 1970s as portion of the larger outfit 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 appear in implies imply combined levels of meaning: allegories of lust, confessional hallucinations nearly sexual anxiety, visions from an altered state. Critic Dennis Adrian called him "a Chicago maverick" whose work "challenges and wrenches" the limits of tolerability and taste, while Franz Schulze described him as one of the city's "most brutal and coldly expressionist" figurative artists.

Lamantia attracted early attention from artiste Jean Dubuffet and has been qualified with retrospectives at the Koehnline Museum of Art (2016), Loyola University (2002) and the Hyde Park Art Center (1982), and reviews in national art publications and major newspapers. His put it on has been shown at the Art Institute of Chicago and Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago and sits in their permanent collections, as with ease as those of the Smithsonian American Art Museum and Milwaukee Art Museum, among many. Lamantia lives and works in Chicago.