CHICAGO — No artist, to my knowledge, was making stranger, sexier, more vexing work in the 1970s than Christina Ramberg. At the same time, I can’t think of an artist more deeply cherished and missed by her peers.
As Ramberg developed, her immaculate paintings became progressively stranger and more fetishistic, until fishnet fabrics became skin, glossy hair became armor, and torsos became electricity towers. The critic Dan Nadel described Ramberg’s increasingly complex later works, made between 1979 and 1981, as “single-artist,” referring to the surrealist drawing game whereby each person adds a new section of a body without being able to see the previous parts.
She had a collector’s cast of mind — fastidious, discriminating, curiously offbeat — and was fascinated by morphologies. The show contains a wall of battered dolls, which followed her around from home to home. Some of her paintings almost double as inventories of graphic techniques applied not only to the picture but also the frames: faux bois , marbleizing, tromp l’oeil “glare” marks and so forth.
Parts of the diary have been redacted by Ramberg’s family, but as art historian and curator Judith Russi Kirshner explains in the catalogue, its entries reveal much about Ramberg’s inner life, artistic ideas and erotic hankerings.
Ramberg was critical about her own body. She was tall and felt this interfered with her desire, in sexual situations, to be dominated by a man. During the heyday of second-wave feminism, she seems to have been ambivalent about the movement. But she read and admired Simone de Beauvoir, attracted, perhaps, by her tragic vision of relations between the sexes. Anaïs Nin’s erotic perspective, meanwhile, made her “proud to be a woman, proud of women.
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