Art Institute of Chicago Presents Christina Ramberg: A Retrospective
Christina Ramberg. Bound Hand, 1973. Collection of the Henry and Gilda Buchbinder Family, Chicago.
The Art Institute of Chicago has announced Christina Ramberg: A Retrospective on view from April 20–August 11, 2024. With more than 100 works, this exhibition is the first comprehensive survey of Christina Ramberg’s work in more than 30 years.
The show will feature several key pieces from the Art Institute of Chicago’s permanent collection complemented by numerous loans from across public and private collections, many of which have never been on view prior to this show.
From intimate early paintings focused on the pattern and form of women’s hairstyles and garments, to mature work featuring cropped female torsos and hands, the exhibition presents her most iconic imagery while offering a rare opportunity to see all phases and elements of Ramberg’s continually evolving 20-year career.
“Seeing this volume of work truly showcases her evolution as an artist, even across her relatively short career,” said Thea Liberty Nichols, associate research curator, Modern and Contemporary Art. “Her focus was clear from the beginning but she challenged herself to continuously develop and refine her vision across different media and modes of representation. This forward-thinking way of working can be seen as predictive of the approach taken by numerous artists working today.”
Ramberg pushed boundaries with her paintings, straddling figuration and abstraction, while questioning idealized body types and gender presentation. She is best known for these stylized paintings of fragmented female bodies, but she also experimented with quilting, printmaking, and drawing. Among her contemporaries, she served as an archivist, note-taker, slide-maker, collector, and diarist. Sketchbooks, 35mm slides, and dolls from Ramberg’s informal archive of ephemera offer a fuller understanding of the artist’s practice and how she digested an enormous breadth of source material to create her edgy yet empathetic body of work.
Chicago-based, she was a student at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in the 1960s and 1970s and eventually became the first female Chair of the Painting and Drawing Department at the school in 1985. Her relationships—with fellow artists, colleagues, and students—left a lasting impression on those who knew her and their work.
The exhibition is accompanied by a catalog with essays and insights.
Christina Ramberg: A Retrospective is organized and curated by the Art Institute of Chicago’s Thea Liberty Nichols, associate research curator, Modern and Contemporary Art, and Mark Pascale, Janet and Craig Duchossois Curator, Prints and Drawings. It will travel to the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, October 12, 2024–January 5, 2025, and Philadelphia Museum of Art, February 8–June 1, 2025.