Loose Beauty

Christina Ramberg’s paintings frequently present the female figure in pieces—a torso, a foot, the back of a head. The visual impact of her fetishistic fragmentation of the body is heightened through a meticulous attention to the painted surface; this “finish-fetishism” is a common formal feature of the work of the Chicago Imagists, with whom Ramberg was affiliated in the late 1960s. A persistent concern throughout her work is the ambivalent relationship between the female body and the material that adorns it. In Loose Beauty, the textural interplay between the figure’s smooth flesh and alternately slick and scalloped undergarments calls attention to a duality of pleasurable sensuality and disciplining constraint.