Carol Rama was born in Turin in 1918. Self-taught, she adopted and appropriated every subject she pleased, often in a simplified and intuitive manner for her own therapeutic ends. Chief among them was the female nude. Despite her lack of formal training, she quickly fraternised with some of the most familiar names of her era, such as Felice Casorati, Albino Galvano, Italo Calvino, Massimo Mila, Carlo Mollino, Gualtiero Passani and Corrado Levi.
Her watercolours of naked women, sometimes depicted with amputated limbs or in wheelchairs, expressed an overt eroticism. These were accompanied by additional anthropomorphised elements, as her work was populated with animals, orthopaedic prostheses, dentures, shoes and body parts, including phalluses, arms, feet and tongues. In so doing, the artist sought to express her anxieties and fantasies, while grappling with the trauma of her father’s suicide and the psychiatric illness that then befell her mother. An abstract period followed, with her painting deeply influenced by themes from the contemporary context, like the Vietnam War, the Cold War or mad cow disease.
Her first ever solo show at Galleria Faber in Turin in 1945 was shut down because of the sensitive nature of her subject matter, and her work was seized by the authorities. It took some time for her corpus to attain regular exposition. A few figures were key in that regard, such as Lea Vergine, who helped secure greater visibility for her older pieces from the 1980s onwards. She curated her first anthological exhibition in the churchyard of Milan Cathedral in 1985. International appreciation soon returned. Her first exhibition in the United States took place at the Esso Gallery in New York in 1997, organised by Filippo Fossati and Jennifer Bacon. Public exhibitions garnered attention with the international public, notably with her own showroom at the 45th Venice Biennale in 1993, the 1996 collective Inside the Visible at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston (and subsequently Washington and Perth) and her anthological exhibition at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam in 1998. She capped off the period by being awarded the Golden Lion for her career at the 50th Venice Biennale in 2003.
2004 saw a major anthological exhibition at the Sandretto Re Rebaudengo Foundation in Turin, later replicated at the Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art of Trento and Rovereto and the Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art in Gateshead, UK. The City Museum of Ulm in Germany and the Taxispalais Gallery in Innsbruck also organised extensive retrospectives in 2004 and 2005.
Since then, other notable shows have included: La Passione secondo Carol Rama, GAM Civic Gallery of Modern and Contemporary Art, Turin (2017); Carol Rama – Lei, Lui, Loro, Exhibiting and Moving Arts Centre, Cagliari and MACC Museum of Contemporary Art, Calasetta (2016); La passion selon Carol Rama, Paris Museum of Modern Art (2015); Il garbo è tutto. Segni e carte di Carol Rama, GAM Civic Gallery of Modern and Contemporary Art, Turin (2014-2015); La Passió segons Carol Rama, MACBA Museum of Contemporary Art, Barcelona (2014-2015); Di quadro in quadro, opere 1937-2003, Galleria Carlina, Turin (2013); and Carol Rama, Spazio Anche Più Che Tempo, Isabella Bortolozzi Gallery, Berlin (2012).
Rama passed away in 2015.
