PHILADELPHIA, PA.- The Philadelphia Museum of Art announced Christina Ramberg: A Retrospective, the largest survey of Christina Ramberg (1946–1995) to date. On view from February 8 through June 1, 2025, this comprehensive retrospective brings together nearly 100 works, including paintings, quilts, sketchbooks, and archival ephemera, to illuminate Ramberg’s remarkable career and distinctive visual vocabulary. Ramberg metabolized an encyclopedia of imagery to interrogate embodied experiences of gender and normative ideals of female beauty, enacted through restrictions and rituals she presents as at once ridiculous, sinister, and sexy.
The exhibition is accompanied by a catalog of essays and archival material, with contributions by Anna Katz, Judith Russi Kirshner, Riva Lehrer, Ricky Swallow and Lorri Gunn Wirsum.
Typically associated with the Chicago Imagists, Ramberg is best known for her stylized paintings of fragmented and fetishized female body parts and their erotic trappings hands, hair, torsos, stockings, and shoes–drawing on pop culture influences from comic books to store-front displays. This exhibition presents Ramberg’s most iconic imagery while offering a rare opportunity to see the evolution of her 20-year career. From intimate early paintings focused on the pattern and form of women’s hairstyles and garments, such as Shady Lacy (1971), Ramberg continually refined her vision, eventually reducing flesh and fabric to geometric assemblages, as in her increasingly abstract mature works like Japanese Showcase (1984).
The exhibition features key paintings from the PMA’s permanent collection, alongside numerous loans from public and private collections, many of which have never been on view prior to this exhibition. Works such as Cabbage Head (1968) encapsulate the startling simplicity and wit of Ramberg’s aesthetic idiom, which condenses a range of references and tensions into strikingly succinct images. Framed as a small dressing table mirror, this painting of a hand probing a woman’s elaborately styled hair highlights the strange conditions of female embodiment and its social construction; the texture of the hairstyle comically recalls the titular vegetable, while also harboring sinister intimations of the brain beneath.
Ramberg’s paintings continually pushed formal boundaries, straddling figuration and abstraction, while questioning normative injunctions of sexuality and gender. Primarily associated with these stylised paintings, she also experimented with quilting, printmaking, and drawing, and among her contemporaries served as an archivist, collector, and diarist. Sketchbooks and notebooks from Ramberg’s informal archive of ephemera offer a fuller understanding of the artist’s practice, illustrating her integration of an enormous breadth of source material into her polished yet enigmatic aesthetic. In addition to charting the development of her creative practice, this retrospective explores Ramberg’s life as a devoted teacher, becoming the first woman to chair the Department of Painting and Drawing at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 1985. Over 250 archival slides used while teaching illuminate Ramberg’s pedagogical commitment and the lasting influence of her singular artistic vision.
Christina Ramberg: A Retrospective is organized by the Art Institute of Chicago and curated by Thea Liberty Nichols, Associate Research Curator, Modern and Contemporary Art, and Mark Pascale, Janet and Craig Duchossois Curator, Prints and Drawings. The presentation at the PMA is organized by Eleanor Nairne, Keith L. and Katherine Sachs Curator and Head of Modern and Contemporary Art, with Camila Rondon, Departmental Coordinator for Contemporary Art.
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