![]() Ramberg’s vision was rooted in her deep interest in the graphic idioms of comics. Look at the way curves in her picture turn into straight lines and sharp points, the way serrated edges slice through smooth expanses, and the way elastic hems squeeze soft flesh. But Ramberg’s sensibility had something uniquely, almost disturbingly cool about it, suggesting both danger and bliss, and always hovering close, you feel, to a psychological breaking point. She began to distort the bodies themselves and then to blur the lines between body and adornment, so that many of her inventions suggest weird hybrids of woman, fantasy and machine.Ī well-worn path, you might think. In her small-scale works, she adorned cropped body parts with undergarments, corsets, brassieres and patterned fabrics. ![]() Ramberg, certainly, was intensely controlled. The Imagists preferred taut, highly finished pictures, which invited different qualities of attention, different kinds of focus. In the previous decade, she had been affiliated with the Chicago Imagists, a loose cluster of artists often confused with the Hairy Who, another Chicago-based collective.Īrtists from both groups were inspired by cartoons and surrealism, but the Chicago Imagists were not, generally speaking, as manic and anarchic as such Hairy Who artists as Jim Nutt, Gladys Nilsson and Karl Wirsum. This piece, at the Art Institute of Chicago, is called “Loose Beauty.” It was made in 1973, when Ramberg was hitting her stride. Every time I see her work I fall under its spell. But for more than a decade, she had something extraordinary going on - something acutely perceptive, fastidiously executed and wholly original. She died in 1995, shortly before she turned 50. And then something extra - something I struggle to get a handle on because I can never answer a nagging question: What is the compulsion behind it? Why did Ramberg need to make it? Roy Lichtenstein’s Ben-Day dots toot chords of innocent irony.Ĭhristina Ramberg’s work summons sex and discipline. An Andy Warhol silk-screen evokes mind-shriveling, media-glazed detachment. Helen Frankenthaler’s blooming stains in diluted oils suggest ecstatic cloud-drifts of reverie. Styles of painting denote states of mind.
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