Thoughts That Cure Radically: Christina Ramberg ‘Corset Urns and Other Inventions 1968-1980’ David Nolan Gallery

David Nolan Gallery presents a focused selection of Chicago artist Christina Ramberg’s drawings and paintings in, ‘Corsets Urns and Other Inventions 1968-1980’. Displaying a selection of early foundational work, Ramberg, who passed away in 1995, utilizes smartly drawn forms to describe constriction and control. Displaying more drawings than paintings, the exhibition makes a case for Ramberg’s formal and emotional tenor. A student at the Art Institute of Chicago, Ramberg’s work was exhibited alongside other Chicago ‘Imagist’ painters at the Hyde Park Art Center. Similar to her Imagist compatriots, Ramberg eschewed much ‘progressive’ (New York) avant-garde thinking in favor of tightly drawn and psychologically complex representational images. Breaking away from overly restrictive artistic thinking, these artists drew from Mexican bodega street signs they found on Milwaukee Avenue as well as Renaissance portraits displayed in the Art Institute. Ramberg’s innovation was to add a forceful female voice to a group that fortunately already had several. Sadomasochism and domesticity comingle in doodle drawings and sharply delineated paintings. Neither shaggy nor overly stiff, her paintings of panties, arrows, bras and hair add a distinctive voice to contemporary painting and helped usher in a younger generation of artists, including Lisa Yuskavage and Dana Schutz. Unnerving, taught and guarded, Ramberg stands in the psychologically and formally audacious lineage of Artemisia Gentileschi. Ramberg died young, lived and worked in Chicago, worked in a deliberately ‘minor’ style and exhibited alongside recalcitrant artist colleagues, has not had the reputation she is due. Hopefully the current gallery exhibition of drawings and multi paneled paintings will begin a corrective.