There’s something enticing, yet unsettling, about the new Christina Ramberg exhibition happening at the Philadelphia Museum of Art right now.
The show, Christina Ramberg: A Retrospective, which runs until June 1, examines the underbelly of feminine beauty and the male gaze.
Ramberg was born in Kentucky in 1946, then spent most of her career in Chicago. This is the exhibition’s final stop, after showings in Chicago and Los Angeles.
“She had a very interesting, intense interest in the female body,” said Camila Rondon, Departmental Coordinator for Contemporary Art at the museum. “It’s this idea from when she was young: the idea of perfection, of women having to do their hair up in buns or wearing heels.”
The exhibition begins with dozens of small paintings, many created on masonite. Some are in custom frames, while others were painted on old hand mirrors. The images include cropped closeups of female body parts dressed in fetishwear, lingerie, intimates and lace. Rarely do the paintings include any part of a woman’s face.
“She was always interested, and she was very open about it in her journals, in kink and BDSM magazines,” Rondon said. “You can see that so vividly with the way that these bodies are positioned. You can never really see if that individual is in that position because they’re doing it, or someone else is doing it to themselves.”
A singular style
The bodies aren’t male fantasies. They are real and fleshy with lips of fat. Still, the perfectionism that goes into the illusion of the female beauty routine is apparent in Ramberg’s own artistic process. Some of the paintings, like the pairing Shady Lacy, appear more like prints because the work is so refined and controlled — there isn’t a brushstroke in sight.
“You can really see how meticulous she is about her painting,” Rondon said. “If she would see any kind of sense of paint, her brush or her hand, she would sand it down again and then paint on top of it. So, it’s this very graphic quality that all her paintings have.”
Ramberg is associated with the Chicago Imagists, a prolific group of artists in the 1960s and ‘70s. As a kid, she was fascinated by her mother’s beauty routine.
“She would watch her mother dress for events,” Rondon explained. “She would see her put on these garments, garters, corsets. She’d be really intrigued by how her mother’s body would change and also a little bit disturbed by it. Why did women have to sculpt their bodies in this way?”
Artwork of women in lacy lingerie are typically pinup-type figures, drawn by men for men, meant to entice and excite. Ramberg’s paintings take inspiration from this type of style, then add an extra layer. After all, most men don’t understand the hourlong routine it takes to get one’s hair washed and curled just right, or the discomfort of a pushup bra’s underwire.
By isolating specific parts of the body, there is a knowing objectification of the figure, and the works can take on a disturbing quality. After all, a woman’s body can be somewhat uncanny as a singular body part — a fact that Coralie Fargeat’s popular body horror film, The Substance, made abundantly clear last fall.
The exhibition features different stylistic phases throughout Ramberg’s 20-year-career. As she evolves her style, she takes ideas of how women contort themselves — and then contorts them even further. Paintings become larger and she ratchets up the discomfort. Some depict headless torsos. Some have amputations and bandages. Some birth new figures. They are demonstrably less human and more androgynous.
“They’re very surreal,” Rondon said. “But it’s an interesting amalgamation of like, different elements that she’s focused on previously … You see very fine lines of what look like body hair in certain places. And it gives you different senses of different female and male forms, but it’s not clear.”
Ramberg uses hair throughout her artwork to explore expectations around femininity. Luscious, thick, long locks are considered beautiful, and some of her work features corsets made from pin straight hair — cinching in the waist and strangling the body. Then again, too much hair in the wrong place is undesirable. Other pieces feature bodies with torsos and thighs covered with both curly and straight locks.
Meeting the artist
The exhibition also takes time to give greater insight into the artist herself. In the middle of the show is a slideshow projection of around 650 images Ramberg kept as inspiration and would show to friends. There is also a large picture of Ramberg herself. She sits in her home workshop holding her cat in her lap. She wears a cardigan and thick circular glasses, appearing more like a librarian than this artist fascinated with kink and BDSM.
“She was a 6-foot-1 woman at the time she was coming up, that was not very common,” Rondon said. “When she was younger, her mother would either make or alter her clothes. Once she got older, she did the same.”
The final part of the exhibition features Ramberg’s later work. The artist had a relatively short career and died from early onset dementia at the age of 49. In her later years, she became disillusioned with painting and the attention to detail it required, so she turned to sewing. The show has five of Ramberg’s quilts on display. Some are more light and homey, made from old clothing, Hawaiian shirts and ties.
“It’s still painting in a way, but you’re not having to create something completely from scratch,” Rondon said. “You have elements that you can weave together. And so I think that’s where painting was maybe too much kind of creating something out of nothing. But with quilting, she could really kind of piece together these interesting colors, these interesting textures and still make something.”
A final mystery
The final paintings that Ramberg created at the end of her life are a bit mysterious, as she didn’t write about them. They are geometric, abstract forms — some retaining that bust-like shape.
“There’s a looseness that wasn’t there before in the brush work,” Rondon said. “Unfortunately, this was around the time that she was diagnosed with early onset dementia. She had Pick’s disease, and so there is a sense of possibility that she moved to less-meticulous painting practices, possibly because of the physicality of it.”
While Ramberg is well-known in Chicago, Rondon said that she hopes Philadelphians will come to the PMA and learn more about this woman who painted 50 years ago but whose ideas and perspectives are very much contemporary.
“She has never had a retrospective like this here in Philly. She’s never been truly shown here at this museum,” Rondon said. “You really see [her style] echoed in some of the works now. Contemporary and Chelsea galleries, you could walk in and see a work like that.”
And while the women in Ramberg’s artwork are mysterious, Rondon hopes that the exhibition will take away some of the mystery and give visitors a better sense of the woman herself. Some of Ramberg’s relatives, including her son and husband, came to the show to see the retrospective themselves. Some live in the area and got the chance to learn more about her.
“Just talking to them and seeing them interacting with her work was just really beautiful,” Rondon said. “Having her family here really made it so real. She was so beloved, and her legacy really is continuing.”
