Morgan, Korman, and Field Galleries (Galleries 150-155)
Main Building
This exhibition, the largest of Christina Ramberg’s work to date, will illuminate the artist’s encyclopedia of imagery exploring experiences of gender, sexuality, and normative ideals of female beauty.
Born in 1946, Ramberg has tended to be associated with the Chicago Imagists, a loose fellowship of artists in the mid-1960s who made vibrant work inspired by popular culture, from comic books to low-budget films and store-front displays. However, her exquisitely detailed, kinky aesthetic has always set her apart. Ramberg consistently worked in pursuit of a “coherent visual statement”, honing in on feminized aspects of the body and its erotic trappings: hairstyles, hands, corsets, shoes.
Sometimes, she would render these details as highly polished, fetishized forms; elsewhere, she would amalgamate them into almost abstract hybrid figures. As Ramberg indicated in a diary entry, her work exists within the fertile friction between opposing dyads: “abandon / restraint, concealment / revelation, strong / weak, chaos / order”.