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Black History Month 2025

‘Christina Ramberg: A Retrospective’ examines female body, power with fragmenting

A portion of the gallery for the exhibition “Christina Ramberg: A Retrospective” at the Hammer Museum features pieces of Ramberg’s artwork displayed on beige and white walls. The exhibit opened Oct. 12 and will be on display until Jan. 5, 2025. (Courtesy of Jeff McLane)

"Christina Ramberg: A Retrospective"

Christina Ramberg

Hammer Museum

Oct. 12 - Jan. 5, 2025

By Harbaksh Kaur

Nov. 19, 2024 4:40 p.m.

At the Hammer Museum, new life is being given to 20th century artwork.

The Hammer Museum’s exhibition “Christina Ramberg: A Retrospective” opened Oct. 12 and will close Jan. 5, containing about 100 pieces spanning the titular artist’s career. Ramberg, a Chicago-based artist whose work mainly focused on depicting elements of the female body, was born in 1946 and died in 1995. The Hammer Museum’s exhibition is one of the few centered around her portfolio since her death. Paulina Pobocha, a former Robert Soros senior curator for the Hammer Museum and current chair and curator of modern and contemporary art at The Art Institute of Chicago, said this retrospective will bring Ramberg’s work to audiences and artists who may not have seen it before while broadening their horizons and encouraging them to ask questions about the art scene of the 1960s and 1970s.

“That period in art made in the United States is still extraordinarily relevant, especially in the past decade when issues of popular culture and representations of popular culture have come really to the foreground,” Pobocha said.

[Related: Art exhibit review: ‘Exploring the Alps’ expresses wide range of mediums but fails to reach its peak]

Much of Ramberg’s work surrounds the female body and binding it in different ways, Pobocha said. Many of the paintings in this retrospective were created in the 1960s and 1970s, Pobocha added, when depicting female bodies in provocative ways or in bondage was not seen often.

“It really speaks to the kind of constrictions that were placed on women in general in terms of representation and what can and can’t be represented,” she said. “I think that has a broader reflection on expectations of women’s desires.”

Pieces of art by Christina Ramberg are shown in a white-walled gallery in the exhibit "Christina Ramberg: A Retrospective." The exhibition is one of the few to be centered around Ramberg&squot;s work in the years since her death, as the Chicago-based artist died in 1995. (Courtesy of Jeff McLane)
Pieces of art by Christina Ramberg are shown in a white-walled gallery in the exhibit "Christina Ramberg: A Retrospective." The exhibition is one of the few to be centered around Ramberg's work in the years since her death, as the Chicago-based artist died in 1995. (Courtesy of Jeff McLane)

Thea Nichols, co-curator of the Ramberg retrospective for The Art Institute of Chicago, said Ramberg took substantial inspiration from popular culture while depicting the female body with different garments and hairstyles. The fragmented cropping of her work was a distinct style of Ramberg’s that was important to understand her formal point of view, she added.

“She was interested in looking at the figure in these very formal ways in terms of the binding and containment of flesh and of hair,” Nichols said. “But also the broader implications of those kinds of activities on a female figure in particular and how that represented agency or lack thereof for the figure.”

[Related: Alumnus Shizu Saldamando recognizes community importance, diversity in artwork]

Yuriko Terada, a Hammer Museum visitor who had seen the retrospective, said the collection was surprising in its depiction of the female body, and it gave her the impression of the exploitation of women. Terada said she also found it interesting how Ramberg’s style changed throughout her life. She added that the paintings started to become more geometrical later in Ramberg’s artistic journey.

Ramberg’s later work encompassed geometric shapes from her interest in origami, and she would frequently take smaller-sized paintings and combine them to create a larger work, Nichols said. This technique might have been a response to Ramberg becoming a new mother and dealing with time constraints to create her paintings, she added.

A portion of the gallery for the Hammer Museum&squot;s exhibit "Christina Ramberg: A Retrospective" features a rectangular room with several artworks on the walls and two gray benches. Thea Nichols, who co-curated an exhibit on Ramberg&squot;s work for The Art Institute of Chicago, said the artist&squot;s portfolio focused upon depicting the female body through fragmented cropping. (Courtesy of Jeff McLane)
A portion of the gallery for the Hammer Museum's exhibit "Christina Ramberg: A Retrospective" features a rectangular room with several artworks on the walls and two gray benches. Thea Nichols, who co-curated an exhibit on Ramberg's work for The Art Institute of Chicago, said the artist's portfolio focused upon depicting the female body through fragmented cropping. (Courtesy of Jeff McLane)

Through her research, Nichols said she found that other artists were encouraged by Ramberg’s ability to manage a family while achieving success as a creative. She added that Ramberg also taught at the School of The Art Institute of Chicago, where she earned her bachelor’s and master’s degrees, influencing other artists in many ways – even if it was not visible in their work.

Fragmentation is an overarching theme in Ramberg’s work with her paintings of the female torso or other body parts bound with hair or cloth, Pobocha said. She added that the concept of fragmentation in Ramberg’s work reminded her of an idea presented by art historian Linda Nochlin, who studied this idea in relation to the French Revolution. Just as the body politic fell apart at the time, the human body was also falling apart because of the guillotine, Pobocha said.

“Taking something that is whole, and what does that mean symbolically, breaking it down?” Pobocha said. “That conveys a whole different way of looking at the world … that we aren’t whole, that things are in flux, that things always hold the possibility of breaking.”

In her work, Ramberg’s depiction of bondage and potentially restrictive clothing on women, such as corsets, juxtaposed the presentation of these garments as empowering, Nichols said. She added that both of those elements existed in the same work, making it seem almost haunting. Pobocha added that the fetishism that could exist in Ramberg’s work stems from the idea of fragmentation, as her depicting specific parts of the body in her art was a process of disassociating the parts from the whole body. Ramberg’s representation of the female figure was almost nostalgic, Nichols added, especially with the muted earth tones used in her paintings that differed from her peers.

Pobocha said she hopes this exhibit will broaden the dialogue to communities about what was happening in the U.S. during the time Ramberg’s art was created.

“A woman putting these images out there for consumption or to be seen, I think itself is a radical political gesture at that time,” Pobocha said.

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Harbaksh Kaur
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