The Making of Husbands: Christina Ramberg in Dialogue

The Making of Husbands: Christina Ramberg in Dialogue
14.09.2019 - 05.01.2020

Alexandra Bircken, Sara Deraedt, Gaylen Gerber, Frieda Toranzo Jaeger, Konrad Klapheck, Ghislaine Leung, Hans-Christian Lotz, Senga Nengudi, Ana Pellicer, Christina Ramberg, Richard Rezac, Diane Simpson, Terre Thaemlitz, Kathleen White

Curator: Anna Gritz
Assistenzkuratorinnen: Kathrin Bentele, Léon Kruijswijk

“Containing, restraining, reforming, hurting, compressing, binding, transforming a lumpy shape into a clean smooth line,” is how American artist Christina Ramberg (1946–95) 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 cropped torsi, sharply delineated and bound in bizarre variations explore the body in traction with its environment, which is shaped by corsets, hairdos as well as behavioral conventions. The core of the exhibition at KW form a selection of paintings and drawings by Ramberg alongside of which other artistic positions extend the understanding of the type of framing devices that can be identified as having an impact on and condition performance, behavior, and physical expression. The exhibition will be accompanied by a substantial publication.

The Making of Husbands is produced by KW in collaboration with 49 Nord 6 Est – Frac Lorraine, Metz (France) and BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art, Gateshead (UK), where it will be presented in 2020.