CHRISTINA RAMBERG American, 1946-1995

Christina Ramberg (b. 1946, Fort Campbell, KY; d. 1995, Chicago, IL) attended the School of the Art Institute (SAIC) in the late 1960s where she earned her BFA in 1968. She studied painting, print making, and drawing. While at SAIC, Ramberg met Philip Hanson (whom she ended up marrying), Roger Brown, and Eleanor Dube who (among others) formed the “Chicago Imagists” and they also exhibited their works of art at the Hyde Park Art Center on the Southside of Chicago between 1968-69 under the name “False Image”. Ramberg was a faculty member and eventual chair of the Drawing and Painting Department at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC). She is best known for her stylized paintings of fragmented female bodies. In her work, she develops a visual vocabulary of fetish objects from hands, torsos, shoes, and locks of hair. Over time these images become increasingly abstract, eventually reduced to a set of simple geometries. 

 Christina Ramberg has been included in numerous solo and group exhibitions, including The Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA), Boston, MA; KW Institute of Contemporary Art, Berlin, Germany; National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C.; RISD Museum, Providence, RI; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, IL; and Madison Museum of Contemporary Art, Madison, WI; amongst others. 

 Ramberg’s work is included in the collections of the Art Institute of Chicago; the DePaul University Art Museum, Chicago; Koffler Foundation Collection, the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington D.C.; Illinois State Museum; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; Madison Museum of Contemporary Art, WI; Museum Moderner Kunst, Vienna; Museum of Modern Art, New York; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, NY.