David Nolan Gallery is pleased to present BODIES: Ray Yoshida, Christina Ramberg, Deborah Druick, an exhibition bringing together three intergenerational artists united by their strong interest in pattern, design, figuration, and the human body. Collectively, their work is informed by the human experience and the politics around the representation of the human form, as well as by popular culture. The exhibition is on view from June 6 through July 26, 2024.

Yoshida, Ramberg, and Druick stray from the overarching influence of Abstract Expressionism that especially dominated Yoshida and Ramberg’s generations. Their commitment to formal principles instead lends itself to careful studies of the body that crop it or focus on its minute details. Their mutual interest in the human body is more physiological than illustrative, a commitment that is further demonstrated by their works’ compositional strength which reflects more than just raw emotion.

The influence of popular culture in the form of cartoons and comic books manifests in defined lines and weighty figures for whom a world beyond the canvas does not exist. Like the panels of a comic book, these spaces are contained, unlike the Abstract Expressionist tendency to imply the brushstroke’s extension well beyond the space of the canvas.

All three artists bring their investigations into so-called low art to a high plane that questions our perceptions of the world around us. They do not shy from depicting “private” body parts or “negative” human conditions, like isolation. They employ style for study’s sake, deeply informed by the very principles of art as observation and as a translation of what it means to be human.

Ray Yoshida (b. Kapa’a, Hawaii, 1930-2009) was raised in Hawaii and relocated to Chicago, where he became an enormously important figure in the city’s art scene. He studied at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC), where he was possibly influenced by Jean Dubuffet’s famous lecture at The Arts Club of Chicago in 1951 where Dubuffet coined the term “Art Brut.” Yoshida went on to teach at the SAIC, where he nurtured emerging talents like Ramberg and her peers. Artists like Jim Nutt and Gladys Nilsson were friends of Yoshida and likely influenced his work as he influenced theirs. He was a rare teacher; one whose person and art affected young artists around him, and who, in turn, sought to learn from his students, much like Joseph Beuys was famously known to do in Düsseldorf or John Baldessari in California.

Yoshida championed a multitude of source materials, such as pop culture, Eastern art, and self-taught art. His Pop looked different from New York Pop Art; it infused elements of Surrealism and Eastern art with the archetypal symbols of Pop art like the language of advertising. He recognized the power of seemingly insignificant artifacts and sought to share their ability to represent the visual and spiritual lineage of the human story. His rejection of high and low art distinctions and embrace of formal innovation characterizes his work and the way he taught.

It has always been the function of art to stretch the mind some distance beyond the limits of understanding. That ‘distance beyond’ may be spiritual or transcendental or perhaps merely fantastical; somewhere it will overstep the limits of the rational.

–Ray Yoshida

Christina Ramberg (b. Camp Campbell, Kentucky, 1946-1995) was born on a military base in Kentucky. She developed her own highly stylized interpretation of the body under Yoshida’s tutelage at the SAIC. Ramberg continued to champion Yoshida’s radical ideas and enthusiasm for outsider art, and she formed artistic community with her group of friends and peers often known as the Chicago Imagists—including Jim Nutt, Gladys Nilsson, Roger Brown, Barbara Rossi, Ed Paschke, Karl Wirsum, and Suellen Rocca. She collected around 350 dolls, which she displayed on the walls of her apartment. She kept scrapbooks filled with clippings from comics, vintage advertisements, and medical illustrations.