Dalia Ramanauskas

A master of her medium, Dalia Ramanauskas brings heightened focus to the memorabilia of daily life through her meticulous drawings of paper cups, playing cards and other everyday curiosities. With an approach bordering on the scientific, the artist carefully renders each of her subjects like an anthropological specimen. Distortions in shadow and perspective create subtle unrealities within these compositions, imbuing them with a formal tension and poetic atmosphere akin to a Morandi still life. The result of Ramanauskas’ endeavor is a recycling of the precious memorabilia of everyday life and an exaltation of the ordinary.

Dalia Ramanauskas was born in 1936 in Kaunas, Lithuania. She came to the United States in 1949, where she later graduated from Southern Connecticut College in 1958. She has exhibited at the Institute of Contemporsry Art Philadelphia; the Albright Knox Museum, New York; the New Britain Museum of American Art, Connecticut; the Institute of Contemporary Art of the University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia; the Norfolk Museum of Art, Connecticut; and the Rose Art Museum, Brandeis University, Waltham, Massachusetts; among others. Ramanauskas is represented in several permanent collections, including the National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C.; the Minnesota Museum of Art; Chase Manhattan Bank, New York; the Art Institute of Chicago, Illinois; the Fine Arts Museums, California; and the Yale University Art Gallery, Connecticut.