Post War and Contemporary Art

“The Chicago Imagists’ well-known embrace of popular culture rejected hierarchical differences between high and low, and unlike the more ironic Pop artists, Imagists absorbed the formal techniques of cartooning and the funky immediacy of popular culture. Alone among the Chicagoans, Ramberg and Suellen Rocca used overt female imagery while Gladys Nilsson portrayed antic female figures. In the artist’s papers we find an important description of the scrapbook she and her then husband, painter Phil Hanson, kept of comic-book conventions ‘shorthand methods of depicting various themes and objects.’ Comics offered ‘exaggerations, flat color, stylization, mass production, and narrative sequence’ to convey such major themes of humanity as ‘adventure, ideal, crime, horror, science fiction and love.’ The comic artist’s use of entertainment cliché rather than didactic polemics was attractive to Ramberg.”[1]

“Ramberg produced an unusual group of colored drawings of reclining women, again repeated on one page, derived from melodramatic comic strips of the late ‘50s. Using both sides of notebook pages, she first drew one set of figures, then reversed the sheet to trace and adjust her own drawings, to try out different poses for different emotional nuances. Dejected, the figures are clearly in despair and while the cartoon code of long hair becomes a shroud or suffocating pillow in some images, in others, ink-black ponytails highlighted with blue resemble weapons and mountain ranges. Ramberg forges unsettling interconnections between wounds and hairdos, thereby making references to castration, loss, and imaginary threats. …No matter how various and aesthetically considered are the tourniquets and restraints, something always escapes, leaks out protrudes in an embarrassing bulge. In her paintings Ramberg restores bodily integrity and puts them back together again by wrapping them in furs, leather, and lace, yet inevitably the textures she depicts are shown as unraveling and splintering. A constant puzzle of this work is its duality: the intentional, occasionally comic, archive of female fetishism, combined with an aesthetic of repression and repetition.”[2]

[1] Indeck, Karen, Kirshner, Judith, McQuade, Molly and Rossi, Barbara, Christina Ramberg: Drawings, Gallery 400, University of Illinois at Chicago College of Architecture and the Arts, 2000, p. 13[2] Indeck, Karen, Kirshner, Judith, McQuade, Molly and Rossi, Barbara, Christina Ramberg: Drawings, Gallery 400, University of Illinois at Chicago College of Architecture and the Arts, 2000, pp. 26-27