Head

While still a student at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Christina Ramberg (M.F.A. 1973) had already arrived at her preferred subject that she pursued throughout her career: the anonymous fragment of the female form. Her work deals with conventional notions of female beauty and the gendered body. Sometimes she focused on torsos, arms, legs, feet, and hair; sometimes wig dummies or heads styled like cabbages and plastic bags, which, like Head, are faceless, seen from behind, cropped, and fragmented. The formal clarity and stylized figuration of Head continued even as her figuration became more complex and unsettling.

Surrealism and popular culture stimulated Ramberg’s work as they did many of the Chicago Imagists of her generation. She exhibited in the False Image exhibitions at the Hyde Park Art Center on the South Side of Chicago in 1968 and 1969 with Roger Brown, Eleanor Dube, and Phil Hanson. (See Smart Museum 2001.578g-h, 2001.580d.) In this print it is likely that Ramberg was stimulated by fellow Chicago Imagist artist Karl Wirsum’s characteristic comic book style of rendering shadows and light reflections on body parts with jagged, irregular linework and vibrant colors. (See 1998.68p, 2001.511.)