This comprehensive retrospective at the Art Institute of Chicago presents paintings, drawings, and quilts by Chicago Imagist Christina Ramberg with unprecedented depth and insight. Trained at the School of the Art Institute, where she later became a professor, Ramberg is celebrated here for her highly original and prodigious output, tragically truncated by her death from a neurodegenerative disease in 1995, at age 49.
Ramberg’s preoccupation with psychosexual content was clear from the beginning. Six small paintings from her undergraduate years in the exhibition (which runs through August 11 before traveling to the Hammer Museum in October and the Philadelphia Museum of Art in 2025) show a figure cut off at the head and waist shyly disrobing. The series conveys the emotional vulnerability of a young woman revealing a secret self in art. Revelations abound in the exhibition, above all, the daunting force of Ramberg’s imagination as she transforms images gleaned from comics and catalogs into artworks where stylized coifs become urns and then corsets, bodies read as broken furniture, shiny hair doubles as wood, and muscle tissue provides material for tailored suits and jackets. She portrays the female body in ways tantalizing, rebellious, and problematic: encased in fetishistic lingerie, seductive, submissive.
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Shame is a subtext in the early work, thematized in “Skin Pix” (1969), a series of heads in which each figure attempts to hide her rash-ridden face. In one painting, Rose’s Woe, rosacea afflicts a weeping figure veiled by a handkerchief, red roses decorate the wallpaper behind her, and real sugar roses adorn the painting’s faux woodgrain frame. The embarrassing inflammation is a metaphor: “Skin Pix” puns on “skin flicks,” pornographic films trafficking in illicit desire, while the redundant roses suggest female sexuality—here conceived as ailment. Elsewhere, Ramberg associates the flower with lacy undergarments and swollen high-heeled pumps, for example in Belle Rêve (1969), which also depicts a cloche-hatted head seen from the rear. A black-gloved hand reaches up to pat the luxuriant hairdo.
Disembodied hands become a recurring motif in paintings and drawings of the 1970s, inspired by gestures the artist studied in Japanese prints and recorded in her notebooks. Hands in Ramberg’s work clutch white kerchiefs or are bound by black satin straps. Polished red nails, an anachronism at a time when the “natural” look was in style, hark back to women’s fashion during the artist’s childhood. Eroticization of the hands may relate to memories of a mother’s touch, early sensuous experiences of being cleaned, cradled, caressed. The retro garments that mold and constrict the bodies in Ramberg’s provocative paintings—pointy brassieres, girdles, and underarm shields—date to her mother’s generation, and in an interview in 1990, she remembered her conflicted wonderment when as a girl she watched her mother put them on: “I thought it was fascinating … I thought it was awful.” Brilliantly, she reproduces this ambivalence for the viewer, delivering a potent frisson with pictures like Waiting Lady (1972), with its scantily clad figure doubled over, apparently awaiting punishment. The image is riveting yet unnerving because it suggests woman’s humiliation and abuse. Female masochism recalls the passive condition of infancy—having things done to one’s body, like it or not—and on another account, stems from social conditioning: women must repress aggressive impulses, which then morph into masochistic fantasies turned inward toward the self.
The plethora of social demands on women became Ramberg’s subject in the early 1980s. Haunted by the perennial tension for female artists between motherhood and career, she created a series of imposing, heterogeneous figures whose jumbled parts symbolize multiple female roles and split allegiances. In Hearing (1981), the assemblage consists of half a short-sleeved blazer, black nylons, and one sexy and one hugely cumbersome thigh-high boot; she expels a tiny, fully dressed adult from between her legs, while a miniature jacket (read: baby) clings to her side and a pair of trousers (husband?) hangs around her neck. In real life, Ramberg juggled work and family, domestic activities and artmaking. Sewing straddled both realms; she made clothes for herself and her husband and son, as well as quilts for her own aesthetic pleasure. For a time in the mid-’80s, quilting replaced painting in her studio practice.
Several of these monumental textiles feature in the exhibition, which concludes with a group of loosely painted abstractions, a dramatic stylistic departure from what had come before. Whereas the figurative paintings had been on Masonite, with ultrasmooth surfaces and crisp forms, here Ramberg adopted a canvas support, more yielding to the touch. In these linear, symmetrical, diagrammatic pictures, in a grisaille palette reminiscent of X-rays, she schematized the torsos that she subjected in her sketchbooks to untold formal variations: bustier, vase, armor, chairback. Over several pages, Ramberg drew and inventively redrew the thoracic cavity of the agonized body in Italian crucifixions, making the depression framed by the ribcage into a positive, phallic form.
Moreover, she had played in paintings of the ’70s with penile totems she called “Tall Ticklers,” sheathed in lace and tufted with fur, and with uterine forms anthropomorphized as confrontational figures where fallopian tubes become arms and the birth canal, a pair of legs. With the sketchbooks now on view for the first time along with the late paintings, one can see how Ramberg envisioned in the abstractions an internal bodily space either penetrated by or, better, having incorporated the phallus. Hers was a coherent project: to explore female experience and desire and, ultimately, to conflate feminine creativity and masculinist power.