The late Christina Ramberg’s paintings, drawings, and quilts are showcased in a gorgeous and long-overdue retrospective at the Art Institute, on view until August 11. Rather than explore Ramberg’s trenchant themes of gender and the body, I’d like to focus on her personal archive, pieces of which are displayed here. As an artist who also uses archives, albeit in a different fashion, I was fascinated by how the curators integrated Ramberg’s physical ephemera, notebooks, and 35 mm reference slides, all of which provide further insight into her mysterious work.
At the School of the Art Institute, the artist Ray Yoshida—Ramberg’s legendary teacher—encouraged her to fully indulge in collecting as a practice in dialogue with and inspiring her painting. Following Yoshida’s example, Ramberg scoured Chicago’s Maxwell Street Market in the late 1960s and early 1970s. The sprawling bazaar was a favorite haunt of fellow SAIC classmate and artist Roger Brown, who competed with Ramberg for the most elusive finds. She amassed a collection of dolls, 155 of which are on view in the retrospective, hung on a wall similar to how Ramberg displayed them in her home. The doll’s battered forms, some without clothes or heads, echo the faceless compositions and fragmentary bodies in her paintings. In a 1989 Chicago Tribune interview, Ramberg said, “What I like about them is their sense of history. I’m interested in what is implied.”
Ramberg’s archive of personal photos is excerpted in a video slideshow as well as in a large, wall-mounted light box with slides inside. Both offer intriguing glimpses of her visual interests: Victorian corsetry, constricting beauty devices for the face, and folds of fabric rendered in stone and in medieval religious paintings, as well as several austere water tower photos taken by the German photographers Bernd and Hilla Becher. Like them, Ramberg worked with unexpected variations and found transcendence in repetition. She once illuminated her process: “My aim is to make from my obsessions and ideas the strongest, most coherent visual statement possible. Before I can make them strongly stated I need to fully understand what those ideas are. Only then can I really struggle.” It’s a gift to spend time with the matte surfaces of her exquisitely rendered paintings and to see some of the keenly observed sources of their unnerving beauty. I only wish she had lived to make more.
