Christina Ramberg
1946–1995
Associated with the Chicago Imagists as well as the Hairy Who group of artists, Christina Ramberg is best known for her discomfiting paintings of female torsos completed in the 1970s. Rendered in profile and tightly cropped by the edges of the canvas to create a sense of voyeuristic intimacy, the disembodied figures are bound, corseted, and bandaged in outfits that variously recall 1950s lingerie, sadomasochistic bondage, or the bionic prosthetics of the future. Recounting the childhood experience of watching her mother dress for parties, Ramberg would wear a foundation garment referred to as a “merry widow,” and recalled that “the paintings have a lot to do with this, with watching and realizing that these undergarments totally transform a woman’s body. . . . I thought it was fascinating . . . in some ways, I thought it was awful.”
In Istrian River Lady, a figure wears a long-sleeved bustier covered in what appear to be scales and trimmed with hair. The bustier squeezes the chest to an unnatural point. Soft curves of flesh swell over the hard edges of the outfit, and three loose stitches are visible where a seam is bursting at the figure’s shoulder. Ramberg’s paintings betray her conflicted reaction to her mother’s undergarments: it is unclear whether the garments are sources of power or restraints that limit it. Rejecting readings of her work as either feminist or erotically festishistic, Ramberg shifted her subject in the late 1970s from the recognizable female form to an ambiguous, androgynous cyborg.
Introduction
Christina Ramberg (August 21, 1946 – 1995) was an American painter associated with the Chicago Imagists, a group of representational artists who attended the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in the 1960s. The Imagists took their cues from Surrealism, Pop, and West Coast underground comic illustration, and their works often included themes of female sexuality. Ramberg depicted partial female bodies (heads, torsos, hands) often in submissive poses in undergarments, imagined in odd, seemingly erotic predicaments.
Wikidata identifier
Q16750233
Information from Wikipedia, made available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License . Accessed July 4, 2025.
Roles
Artist, painter
ULAN identifier
500090068
Names
Christina Ramberg
Information from the Getty Research Institute's Union List of Artist Names ® (ULAN), made available under the ODC Attribution License. Accessed July 4, 2025.
