The Making of Husbands: Christina Ramberg in Dialogue

The Making of Husbands: Christina Ramberg in Dialogue Christina Ramberg en dialogue

“Containing, restraining, reforming, hurting, compressing, binding, transforming a lumpy shape into a clean smooth line”— is how the American artist Christina Ramberg (1946–1995) once described the drawings of corsets in her sketchbooks. Ramberg was one of the most intriguing painters to emerge within a generation of Chicago Imagists.

Operating under the influences of Surrealism, she painted cropped torsi, sharply delineated and bound in bizarre variations of corsets, bandages, and textures, that exude an unnerving calm burdened with a conflicted desire. At the heart of exhibition lies a selection of Christina Rambergs paintings and drawings, which are put in dialogue with artistic positions such as Alexandra Bircken, Sara Deraedt, Gaylen Gerber, Frieda Toranzo Jaeger, Konrad Klapheck, Ghislaine Leung, Senga Nengudi, Ana Pellicer, Richard Rezac, Diane Simpson, and Kathleen White, who extend Ramberg’s understanding of the body as an environment that is closely intertwined with its surrounding, shaped by corsets, hairdos as well as behavioral conventions.