Christina Ramberg
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Christina Ramberg (August 21, 1946 – 1995) was an American painter associated with the
Chicago Imagists The Chicago Imagists are a group of representational artists associated with the School of the Art Institute of Chicago who exhibited at the Hyde Park Art Center in the late 1960s. Their work was known for grotesquerie, Surrealism and complete i ...
, a group of representational artists who attended the
School of the Art Institute of Chicago The School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC) is a Private university, private art school associated with the Art Institute of Chicago (AIC) in Chicago, Illinois. Tracing its history to an art students' cooperative founded in 1866, which gr ...
in the 1960s. The Imagists took their cues from
Surrealism Surrealism is an art movement, art and cultural movement that developed in Europe in the aftermath of World War I in which artists aimed to allow the unconscious mind to express itself, often resulting in the depiction of illogical or dreamlike s ...
,
Pop Pop or POP may refer to: Arts, entertainment, and media * Pop music, a musical genre Artists * POP, a Japanese idol group now known as Gang Parade * Pop! (British group), a UK pop group * Pop! featuring Angie Hart, an Australian band Album ...
, and West Coast underground comic illustration, and their works often included themes of female sexuality. Ramberg depicted partial female bodies (heads, torsos, hands) often in submissive poses in undergarments, imagined in odd, seemingly erotic predicaments.


Biography

Christina Ramberg was born on Camp Campbell, a Kentucky military base where her father, Vernon Ramberg, was an army officer. Her mother taught music lessons and due to Vernon's military service, the family moved frequently, including overseas. When Christina was two her family moved to
Yokohama is the List of cities in Japan, second-largest city in Japan by population as well as by area, and the country's most populous Municipalities of Japan, municipality. It is the capital and most populous city in Kanagawa Prefecture, with a popu ...
in Japan for two-and-a-half-years, and she attended school in Germany during her third and fourth grades. In the United States, the family lived in Kansas, Virginia, and
Highwood, Illinois Highwood is a North Shore (Chicago), North Shore suburb of Chicago in Moraine Township, Lake County, Illinois, United States. As of the 2020 United States census, 2020 census, the population was 5,074. It is known for its entertainment, restaura ...
where Christina attended Highland Park High School for her junior and senior year. Ramberg earned her Bachelor of Fine Arts in 1968 and her Master of Fine Arts in 1973 both from the
School of the Art Institute of Chicago The School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC) is a Private university, private art school associated with the Art Institute of Chicago (AIC) in Chicago, Illinois. Tracing its history to an art students' cooperative founded in 1866, which gr ...
where she studied with
Ray Yoshida Raymond "Ray" Kakuo Yoshida (October 3, 1930 – January 10, 2009) was an American artist known for his paintings and collages, and for his contributions as a teacher at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago from 1959 to 2005. He was an impor ...
, who was a primary mentor of the Chicago Imagists group that Christina became a part of. The group also included
Jim Nutt James T. Nutt (born November 28, 1938) is an American artist who was a founding member of the Chicago surrealist art movement known as the Chicago Imagists, or the Hairy Who. Though his work is inspired by the same pop culture that inspired ...
,
Gladys Nilsson Gladys M. Nilsson (born May 6, 1940) is an American artist, and one of the original Hairy Who Chicago Imagists, a group of representational artists active during the 1960s and 1970s. She is married to fellow-artist and Hairy Who member Jim N ...
, Roger Brown, and
Ed Paschke Edward Francis Paschke (June 22, 1939 – November 25, 2004) was an American painter. His childhood interest in animation and cartoons, as well as his father's creativity in wood carving and construction, led him toward a career in art. As a stud ...
. Yoshida encouraged his students in the use of commercial and popular culture images such as comic books and magazines as a basis for their art. In Chicago she met her husband Philip Hanson who was also a student with Yoshida and who is also considered a member of the Chicago Imagists group. They were married in 1968, the same year that they both exhibited their work for the first time in the ''False Image'' show at the
Hyde Park Art Center The Hyde Park Art Center (HPAC) is a visual arts organization and the oldest alternative exhibition space in the city of Chicago. Since 2006, HPAC has been located just north of Hyde Park Boulevard, at 5020 S.Cornell Avenue, in the Kenwood neigh ...
. Ramberg and Hanson were both faculty members at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Hanson later reflected that "students liked her a lot. A good woman teacher was important to them, particularly in that time. It was much more dominated by men, so to have a teacher like Christina, who was doing her own work, that was a big deal. The men could be very nice, but it was really meaningful to learn from another woman." Ramberg and Hanson had one son, Alexander, who was born in 1975, but by 1980 the marriage had become strained, and they eventually agreed to live apart, although they remained close for the rest of their lives. In 1989 Ramberg was diagnosed with
frontotemporal dementia Frontotemporal dementia (FTD), also called frontotemporal degeneration disease or frontotemporal neurocognitive disorder, encompasses several types of dementia involving the progressive degeneration of the brain's frontal lobe, frontal and tempor ...
and Hanson took care of her until she had to go to an assisted living facility. She died in 1995 at the age of forty-nine.


Style and works

The depiction of the female torso is the most common motif in Ramberg's art, with the torso being
corset A corset /ˈkɔːrsɪt/ is a support garment worn to constrict the torso into the desired shape and Posture correction, posture. They are traditionally constructed out of fabric with boning made of Baleen, whalebone or steel, a stiff panel in th ...
ed,
girdle A belt without a buckle, especially if a cord or rope, is called a girdle in various contexts, especially historical ones, where girdles were a very common part of everyday clothing from antiquity until perhaps the 15th century, especially for w ...
d, and otherwise constricted and veiled by the bondage-like trappings of typical 1950s female garments. Ramberg relates a memory of watching her mother dress for a party in an interview: "She would wear these—I guess that they are called '
Merry Widow ''The Merry Widow'' ( ) is an operetta by the Austria-Hungary, Austro-Hungarian composer Franz Lehár. The Libretto, librettists, Viktor Léon and Leo Stein (writer), Leo Stein, based the story – concerning a rich widow, and her countrymen's ...
—and I can remember being stunned by how it transformed her body, how it pushed up her breasts and slenderized down her waist. I think that the paintings have a lot to do with this, with watching and realizing that a lot of these undergarments totally transform a woman's body. … I thought it was fascinating … in some ways, I thought it was awful." Another distinguishing feature of Ramberg's art is the absence of any faces, with the head not drawn at all, seen only from the back, or concealed by hair. The motif of the "hairdo" is likewise common in Ramberg's oeuvre, the hairstyle also being indicative of a type of mid-century female "conditioning" or conformity. Critic Katheryn Rosenfeld, in a 2000 ''
New Art Examiner The ''New Art Examiner'' is a bi-monthly international magazine of critical art thinking founded in Chicago, Illinois in October 1973 by Derek Guthrie and Jane Addams Allen. Publication ceased in 2002. The magazine was relaunched in Cornwall, UK ...
'' review stated: "it's... hard not to read in the work a psycho-sexual inventory of the limitations of white middle-class womanhood at mid-century." Ramberg's paintings are highly composed and finished to the point that they themselves are referred to as fetishistic. Worked on masonite in acrylic, they are precisely painted and are characterized by their low tone and mute palette. In a 2012 '' Art in America'' review, Nancy Princenthal described the draftsmanship in Ramberg's 1970 ''Corset/Urn'' series as "inky black with spiky pink highlights, they are prim and sexily sinister... deft, dark and reticent." In the 1970s, Ramberg's work evolved from its strict focus on the female form to less sexualized, even non-human forms such as urns, chair backs and more abstract shapes. Her human forms turned from figures seen from the back or in profile to fully frontal torsos that are more rigid and robotic, and have both male and female characteristics. Still, her signature style remained: crisp, black outlines, muted colors, cropped forms, attention to pattern and detail. By the early 1980s Ramberg took a break from her exploration of the female body and started to quilt more actively. Like her paintings, the patterns in her quilts are crisp and exact, with complex combinations of contrasting colors and forms. In the mid to late 1980s Ramberg's artwork shifted to include a "satellite" motif that incorporated some patterns and shapes from her quilting, while her color palette reverted to the gray, white, blue, and black of her earlier work instead of brighter colors. These later works are referred to as her "satellite" motif phase because the combination of circles, cones triangles, and lines resemble the plans for a telescope, satellite, or some other mechanical invention.


Exhibitions

Ramberg did more group exhibitions than solo exhibitions during her lifetime, but has subsequently gained more individual recognition in contemporary art circles. Exhibitions of Ramberg's work include * ''Christina Ramberg: A Retrospective'', 1968–1988 at the University of Chicago (1988) * ''Christina Ramberg: Drawings'', Gallery 400 at the University of Illinois (2000) * ''The Making of Husbands : Christine Ramberg in Dialogue'', KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin (2019–2020) * ''Christina Ramberg: A Retrospective'', Art Institute of Chicago (2024), Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (2024–25), Philadelphia Museum of Art (2025)


References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Ramberg, Christina 1946 births 1995 deaths American people of German descent Painters from Kentucky 20th-century American painters 20th-century American women painters Painters from Chicago School of the Art Institute of Chicago alumni People from Christian County, Kentucky School of the Art Institute of Chicago faculty