Christina Ramberg’s Sensual Paintings of the Body Still Resonate Today

Women won the right to apply for credit cards and direct their reproductive fates all within Christina Ramberg’s first decade as an artist. While her slinky paintings from the early 1970s at first look more sensual than political, Ramberg’s female forms—which grew more abstract and enigmatic over time—always invoked big-picture questions about women’s desire, representation, and agency. Her bodies harbor a tension that’s alluring, jarring—and achingly relevant today.

Even before her premature death at 49 in 1995, Ramberg was an artist’s artist, particularly in Chicago, where she spent her career. She taught at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago after finishing her MFA there in 1973, and showed with the Chicago Imagists, a Pop-adjacent cohort who packaged cultural commentary in bold aesthetics (though Ramberg’s palette was comparatively subdued, and she sometimes bristled at her inclusion in the group). Now, an ambitious new retrospective at the Art Institute is highlighting Ramberg’s standalone style, amid a surge in institutional attention around her work. Meanwhile, contemporary artists like Melody Tuttle, Cathrin Hoffmann, Summer Wheat, and Clarity Haynes are drawing on her strategies to portray and challenge the constraints and conventions that bind marginalized bodies.

The show “Christina Ramberg”—on view through August 11th—begins in 1968, when Ramberg earned her BFA. Her early works mimic vanity mirrors that show hairdos from behind, rendered with a cartoon quality pilfered from comic books. In one moveable mosaic piece, entitled Hair (1968), 16 tiles feature hands fashioning hairstyles. Ramberg catalogued consumer culture scrupulously. The show shares her sketchbooks and scrapbooks, papered with the comic strips and wig advertisements that informed her, and a tapestry of unsettling used dolls that hung in her home.

Ramberg first became known for paintings where half-dressed women writhe, implying bondage beyond the frame. Softcore swaths of flesh and silk appear, as do hands toying with fabric, evoking masturbation. Ramberg’s diaries recount her taste for BDSM, and her shame around the matter—yet critics tended to view this work through the male gaze, rather than as a reflection of the artist’s own desire. (Playboy even commissioned her in 1972.) Ramberg redirected that gaze soon after in Tall Tickler and Taller Tickler (both 1974), two phallic works referencing novelty condoms.

But Ramberg is perhaps best remembered today for her formal fixation on the torso as a container. The artist produced her largest work on the subject, Corset/Urns, in 1970. Each of its eight panels bears a silhouette eliciting both objects at once. The shapes’ similarities emphasize their contrast: One holds life, the other death. But these vessels also conjure confinement—a sense of the female form being held in, fated for shackles that can be cultural, political, even pleasurable.

More recently, feminist painter and educator Clarity Haynes has picked up on Ramberg’s focus on the expressive potential of the torso: “I believe the body tells stories that faces can’t,” she wrote in 2020. Haynes began painting and drawing volunteers’ torsos for her “Breast Portrait” project three years after Ramberg’s death. But where Ramberg’s early faceless artworks may feel like women chopped into parts for easier appraisal, Haynes’s work—which features female and gender-nonconforming bodies—explicitly promotes self-compassion. As she shared in an email to Artsy, “Second-wave feminists have often misunderstood my cropping of the figure (the decision not to include a face) as violence or objectification.” Rather, Haynes finds it playful.

Summer Wheat also draws from Ramberg’s well of formal strategies in her acrylic-on-mesh paintings that use graphic flatness and fragmented bodies to refute historical representations of women. “I feel we are similar in that we both use geometric abstraction to build our figures,” Wheat said over email. “I’m in conversation with this lineage, and patterning in general, but I’m depicting women breaking boundaries.” Fertile Ground (2023) epitomizes Wheat’s interest in patterning. In the calf-down portrait of a pair of high-heeled feet—a familiar subject within Ramberg’s oeuvre—the wearer’s tights, embellished by bees, accent the work’s vertical rhythm. But unlike Ramberg, who only painted single figures throughout her career, Wheat also depicts bodies tangled around each other.

Ramberg instead collaged increasingly disparate textures into lone figures. In Sedimentary Disturbance (1980), swaths of ornate lace, hair, and more fill an otherwise-vacant torso. The provocative focal point of Simultaneous Emergence (1981) is a vaginal canal, created by two dandily dressed twin forms contorted to resemble an anatomical diagram. These works have a grotesque quality, which contemporary mixed-media artist Cathrin Hoffmann picks up in nudes like Far From Here (2022), where her subject’s gash-like labia resembles that in Ramberg’s Black ’N Blue Jacket (1981).

Both Hoffmann’s and Ramberg’s exaggerated, abstracted anatomies inspire viewers to wonder whether or not they’re supposed to be turned on. “We both share an understanding of the human body as a kinetic site in reciprocity with its environment,” Hoffman wrote of their similarities in an email. Like Ramberg’s, her figures are “part of a wider inquiry into questions concerning freedom, power dynamics, hierarchies, gender construction, desire, and fetishism,” she said. Yet Hoffman seeks to transcend gender, even humanity, “in favor of more complex forms that define the post-digital age.”

Ramberg was just getting there with a series of untitled satellite paintings begun in the throes of that digital age. Untitled #121 (1986) draws a comparison between satellite towers and human forms. The mesmerizing geometries of these technological structures evoke the architecture and innards of a torso, but dissolve the gender binary altogether.