Corbett vs. Dempsey

works by Paul LaMantia

Paul LaMantia was born in Chicago and has lived his entire life in the city. Like many Chicago artists, he trained in the late 1950s as a commercial artist at the American Academy of Arts, and worked as an advertising designer between 1958 and 1964. In 1960 he enlisted in the Army Reserves, and upon returning to Chicago took night classes at the School of the Art Institute. He began exhibiting at some of the major group exhibitions of the mid-1960s, including the Art Institute's Chicago & Vicinity show in 1962 and the Phalanx show at IIT in 1965. LaMantia eventually enrolled as a full-time student at the Art Institute, and received a BFA from there in 1966 and an MFA in 1968.

LaMantia has found himself allied with both the "Monster Roster" artists of the 1950s and 60s, which included Leon Golub, Dominick DiMeo, and Cosmo Campoli and with the later Imagist painters like Ed Paschke and Art Green, thanks to his use of tortured, abstracted figures with pop cultural props (like televisions and sex toys) painted in an ecstatic array of colors.

From 1967 to 1993, LaMantia was an art teacher in the Chicago public schools. He has been the subject of solo exhibitions at the Krannert Center at the University of Illinois in Champaign in 1977, the Hyde Park Art Center in 1982, and at Deson-Zaks Gallery in Chicago. Since 1962, he has been represented in several of the Art Institute's Chicago & Vicinity exhibitions and in the 1994 show "Chicago Imagism" at the Davenport Museum of Art, Iowa.