Exhibition - Christina Ramberg: A Retrospective

This exhibition is the first comprehensive survey in 30 years dedicated to the American artist

The Hammer Museum at UCLA is delighted to announce Christina Ramberg: A Retrospective, the first comprehensive survey in 30 years devoted to the unequivocally distinctive, female-focused work of American artist Christina Ramberg (1946–1995). Organized by the Art Institute of Chicago, where it was on view earlier this year, the exhibition presents a rare opportunity for visitors to experience more than 100 works across a range of media including paintings, quilts, and archival ephemera. The exhibition will be presented at the Hammer from October 12, 2024, to January 5, 2025.

Ann Philbin, director of the Hammer Museum, said, “One hallmark of the Hammer Museum’s exhibition program is presenting retrospectives for previously under-recognized artists. Christina Ramberg, who died at the age of 49, had a brief but provocative and influential career. I am pleased that the Hammer will bring this artist’s work to West Coast audiences as the L.A. venue for this touring exhibition.”

Christina Ramberg: A Retrospective features several key pieces from public and private collections, many of which have never been on view prior to this exhibition. From intimate early paintings focused on the pattern and form of women’s hairstyles and garments, to mature work that pictures the body barely holding together, the exhibition presents Ramberg’s most iconic imagery while offering a rare opportunity to see all phases and elements of the artist’s 20-year career. 
 
Ramberg pushed boundaries with her paintings while questioning idealized body types and gender presentation. She is best known for these stylized paintings of fragmented female bodies, but she also experimented with quilting, printmaking, and drawing. Among her contemporaries, she served as an archivist, note-taker, slide-maker, collector, and diarist. Sketchbooks and 35mm slides from Ramberg’s informal archive of ephemera offer a fuller understanding of the artist’s practice and how she digested an enormous breadth of source material to create her edgy yet empathetic body of work. 

The exhibition is accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue (published by the Art Institute of Chicago and distributed by Yale University Press), available at the Hammer Museum’s store.