REVIEW: “Christina Ramberg: A Retrospective” at the Art Institute of Chicago

Christina Ramberg in Nice, France, 1971, wearing her signature round-frame glasses, a furry coat, and wide-wale corduroy pants. Photographer unknown. Courtesy of Lorri Gunn Wirsum.  

REVIEW
Christina Ramberg: A Retrospective
The Art Institute of Chicago
111 S Michigan Ave.
Chicago, IL 60603
April 20–Aug 11, 2024

By Kristin Mariani

Personal adornment is as much a form of concealing as revealing. I approach “Christina Ramberg: A Retrospective” from the perspective of fashion. The artist was a painter who knew how to sew. Holding a lifelong fascination of fashion, she observed its trends, ideals, and fetishes with a critical eye since her early years watching her mother put on a girdle. The artist made much of her own clothing, given fashion’s limited offerings for a woman of her 6’ 1” stature. Fashion was one of many visual sources that fueled Ramberg’s creative practice.

Christina Ramberg American, 1946–1995, Loose Beauty, 1973. Diptych; Acrylic on Masonite, artist-painted wood frame. Overall: 51.5 x 78.2 cm (20 1/4 × 30 3/4 in.). The Art Institute of Chicago, Twentieth-Century Purchase Fund. 1973.336. © The Estate of Christina Ramberg

A sewing machine is an oscillation of loops and pulls, forming a tension between two thread sources: one from a series of thread guides rigged above the needle, the other from the bobbin case sheltered beneath the machine bed. Perfect tension between a series of discs is key to a good seam. Sewing, whether by hand or machine, is an act of precision in repetition. The structure of a good seam is not unlike the structure of a good painting, where form and content are in perfect tension. 

FIRST VIEWS
Sited on the ground floor of The Art Institute of Chicago’s Modern Wing, Ramberg’s retrospective is blocked in a chronological order that offers two directions forward, wrapping viewers around a ribbon-like trajectory of the artist’s work. The first gallery provides an immediate view of Ramberg’s early works, beginning with a number of square paintings made while Ramberg was still a student at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago. These early paintings were made as serial compositions, where the artist provocatively exploits a specific view of the same subject, with discrete alterations in the textural elements, and clever shifts in the framing devices.

Ramberg’s plot keeps thickening as one continues through the galleries. The exhibit makes evident how Ramberg studied feminine ideals collected in comics, dolls, and fashion catalogs. The artist broke down visual elements from her source materials into discrete building blocks to find new formal relationships between bodies, and what wraps around them. A wall text in the first gallery offers an important clue to Ramberg’s thinking, as she asserted her paintings weren’t “of something, but ABOUT something." 

In these early works, the fashion forms reflect the 40’s, and the post war years of the 50's, when the artist came of age. The subject matter is graspable; figurative fragments might get wrapped like a hand, or pulled like hair. There’s cropped, corseted and girdled hour-glass figures; foot profiles clad in variations of the spectator pump; and titillating bullet-bra busts whose angles date a figurative ideal stuck to collective desires, providing great compositional angles, and figure-ground relationships.

Christina Ramberg, American, 1946–1995. Bound Hand, 1973. Acrylic on Masonite, in artist-painted wood frame 35.6 × 30.5 cm (14 × 12 in.). Collection of the Henry and Gilda Buchbinder Family, Chicago. Obj: 262977. © The Estate of Christina RamberG. Photography by Jamie Stukenberg.

A black satin ribbon wraps around a hand that clasps at it as caught. The wrapping is traceable and its tension present, while the head and tail ends are hidden. 

As one approaches Ramberg’s first horizontal square sequence, Untitled (6 Disrobing Figures), 1964-68, one figure appears to be in six variations. It is not clear what kind of garment is shrouding the figure, but it’s cut from the same cloth. A shadow is present, yet its source is unknown. The garment is being taken off in one image, and then put back on in the next. This Pantone-peach, doll-fleshed figure reveals something in one frame, and hides it in the next. The figure is non-specific in gender, its clothing conflated with its skin, with mouth lines melting into cheeks like a fabric wrinkle, and neck folds gathered from draped flesh. A torso, when exposed, is absent of nipples or a belly button. Something is stuck inside the cloth, with a tension in the hands hidden at the center front. Cloaked by its own grasp, hidden by what it displays, the figure never fully disrobes.

At the time of this early work the group of artists known as the Chicago Imagists had not yet emerged as a distinct collective. The community and creative network formed during the painting of this sequence, while students at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Ramberg made an emblematic statement on behalf of her Imagist peers in Don Baum’s 1969 “False Image” exhibit at Chicago’s Hyde Park Art Center:

“We are interested in the effects gained by withholding information in a work."

This is the play in Ramberg's compositions. The game is alive, and the stakes keep cumulating. The framework of this exhibit is like an oscillation of figure eights, shaping the creative contents of Ramberg’s life’s work.

THE SOURCE MATERIAL
An image clipper
A thumbnail sketcher
A swatch collector

Christina Ramberg, Untitled, United States (Artist's nationality), 1981. Graphite and colored pencils on cream wove graph paper. 27.7 × 21.5 cm (10 15/16 × 8 1/2 in.). Edward and Eleanor DeWitt Design Award Endowment and purchased with funds provided by an anonymous donor. 2000.438. © The Estate of Christina Ramberg.

If there are two ends to the ribbon running through this retrospective, the head and tail ends traverse the galleries fluidly–wrapping a vitrine of her journals and comic book clips, a wall installation of Ramberg’s doll collection, and crossing through a corridor that runs north and south between the two main galleries. Here viewers are bound between a display of slides made by Ramberg, and a wall of framed drawings. If painting marks the face side of Ramberg’s creative practice, her source materials and drawings are a parallel underbelly continually emerging in her paintings. The graphic impulse–whether writing, drawing, or taking a photo–was Ramberg’s mode to examine her own ideas. All these little snippets inform her large-scale paintings in the second half of the exhibit from 1974 to 1986.

THE TORSOS

Walking through the exhibit is like witnessing a painting getting dressed.

The tension at play in Ramberg’s early works gets more complex as the artist’s career progresses, with a painting precision that unfurls like a bolt of fine-spun cloth. Ramberg’s view is specific in all compositions, on all scales, and within all frames. Ramberg saw the framework of a painting as fair play, where a figure serves as both form and content. Ramberg’s shaping devices act as compositional containers, self-imposed restraints for formal repetitions, like cutting into fabric from the outlines of an exquisite corpse garment pattern.

There are cumulative effects and calculated disruptions. Ramberg consistently upped the ante in her compositions, taking increasing structural risks as her paintings increased in scale during the 70’s and 80’s. The below image is one of four larger-than-life figure studies made in 1980 and 1981. Do you see the hair-braids hanging from the headless figure? One is shaped like a crochet hook, while the other loops back on itself, wrapping upward and around like a twisted skein of thread, with no ends in sight.

Christina Ramberg. Black ‘N Blue Jacket, 1981. Collection of Chuck and Kathy Harper, Chicago. © The Estate of Christina Ramberg. Photography by Jamie Stukenberg.

Ramberg’s sartorial source images and drawings inform the structure of this imposing painting. Clothing parts are sub-divided, rendered as if cut from multiple fabrics, creating a convoluted puzzle of tailored bodily forms. Each element is in a very specific tension with what it contains and what it touches. If Jenga were a flat board game, it might look something like this, with bodily insertions and removals from all edges and openings. A convoluted grid of shapes, patterns, and textures challenge every edge of the frame. Garment bodies are human parts, and human parts are garment details. Both male and female in form, this series is loaded with invention, with references to genitalia, sex, fertility, birth, and machinery. If Ramberg was observing post-war fashion in her early paintings, these paintings foretell the power suit of the mid-80’s, and the refute of function in 90’s deconstructionist fashion. The figure, as disjointed as it is, nestles seamlessly on the surface of the painting.

A red pocket detail on Black ‘N Blue Jacket references a mitered quilt square with a graphic black X-motif. The motif is repeated in another painting from this sequence, Simultaneous Emergence, 1981. This time the quilt square forms a white window in the center of the figure, the X-motif hinting to a one-point perspective vanishing point. Repetition reinforces and erodes fixity. The retrospective concludes in a stunning display of Ramberg’s quilts with uncountable square variations on the X-motif. These were made between 1983 and 1989, before she was diagnosed with Pick’s disease. The repetitions of Ramberg’s creative life practice seamed together an infinite number of ends, edges, and frameworks. 

Kristin Mariani is an artist, Couture Editor of Bridge, and Founder of RedShift Couture.

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