Loose Beauty

<p>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 <em>Loose Beauty</em>, 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.</p>