"Christina Ramberg is one of my favourite artists since I discovered her work at the Liverpool Biennal many moons ago. I'm attracted to her dark, graphic aesthetic and lured in by their sensual nature only to see the restrictions: bodies are constrained, heels have the sharpest points, all hinting to a sense of constriction, repression and attempting to control perhaps the uncontrollable" Staff Pick from Claire
‘Containing, restraining, reforming, hurting, compressing, binding, transforming a lumpy shape into a clean smooth line’, is how American artist Christina Ramberg 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. She left a significant body of comic, formally elegant, erotically sinister paintings.
Her understanding of the body as an environment that is closely intertwined with its surrounding, shaped by corsets, hairdos as well as behavioural conventions is central to the exhibition at KW Institute for Contemporary Art (Berlin) that summons an analysis of conduct based on her approach as something constructed by the structures that externally and internally determine our existence.
A selection of paintings and drawings by Christina Ramberg form the core of the exhibition (and this book), alongside the work of other artists such as Alexandra Bircken, Sara Deraedt, Gaylen Gerber, Frieda Toranzo Jaeger, Konrad Klapheck, Ghislaine Leung, Hans-Christian Lotz, Senga Nengudi, Ana Pellicer, Richard Rezac, Diane Simpson, Terre Thaemlitz, Kathleen White.
Published on the occasion of the exhibition, The Making of Husbands: Christina Ramberg in Dialogue at KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin (14 September 2019 – 5 January 2020), and BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art, Gateshead (23 May – 20 September 2020).
Co-published with KW Berlin.
