Fashioning Christina Ramberg’s Paintings

“The whole thing is so weird and funny, delightful and intriguing, because it offers you questions rather than answers.” says Eleanor Nairne, the curator of modern and contemporary art at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, where Christina Ramberg: A Retrospective is currently on view. “The paintings are complicated things. I think they’re complicated because they are, and they aren’t erotic.”

The exhibition, which was originally organized by the Art Institute of Chicago, re-introduces Ramberg outside of her home city. She is best known for her association with the “Chicago Imagists,” a group of figurative painters working in the 1960s (though, Ramberg disliked the term). Ramberg lived and worked in Chicago for most of her life and, eventually, became the first female solo chair of the department of paintings at the very school she attended, the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. 

Ramberg’s works catalogue the female body in different, often sexually provocative, positions. Her figures luxuriate in the trappings of eroticism, but the images also feel static, funny, or unsettling. As Nairne explains, “They might be erotic in subject, but I don’t know that they’re arousing images, which I think is partly because there’s a very obsessive quality to them in how they’ve been made.” 

Ramberg worked with absolute precision and seamlessness that belies her own labor. She painted on Masonite—a type of hardboard—then sanded down the surfaces, so the impression of her own hand cannot be traced. Nairne tried to replicate the process, to understand what it was like to work on such a surface. She described it as “terrifying.” 

“It’s basically putting down a million individual, tiny, tiny strokes, and any one of those is going to send the whole thing awry. It felt, for me, a little bit like doing needlework, which is interesting because then you get the quilts later,” adds Nairne.

Ramberg was an accomplished seamstress, owing to a lifetime altering clothes for her six-foot-one frame, and in the 1980s, she turned to quilting as her primary medium. In the quilts, Ramberg playfully, subversively repurposed fabric from Hawaiian shirts and flannel bedsheets. She emphasized seams and use value, visibly accentuating the effort she elided from her paintings. If the paintings seem to denude her figures of specificity, the quilts highlight character—what she referred to as the “grit and splendor of real life.”

In this way, Ramberg’s movement towards textiles feels like a natural complement to her earlier work. Seeing the quilts in the later galleries highlights the omnipresence of fashion items in the paintings. From series to series, Ramberg treats the body and clothing as equally important, each scaffolding the form of the other. Clothing’s absence or minimized presence is, after all, what makes a nude. 

Ramberg’s paintings, which seem to stress the body undressing, protect rather than reveal their subjects. Fabrics adhere to her figures like dressing for a paper doll, and this standard-model femininity disguises the irregularity and specificity of the human body. Ramberg thus exposes the way femininity and eroticism operate as patterns that, ultimately, reflect our expectations back at us. 

“All of the works, give or take, are within scale of the body. One of the things I find interesting about the quilts is that although they were always intended to hang on gallery walls, they have that immediate relationship to the body because they're a kind of shroud,” says Nairne. “It is about the question of how we clothe the body, how we put the body into the world.”