Carol Rama in 10 (f)acts

Carol Rama’s artistic career attests to her immense knowl­edge of histor­ical and contem­po­rary art move­ments, despite the fact that she herself was quick to abandon the formal art training she began in her native Turin in the 1930s. Perhaps this move explains how the excep­tional artist came to create her own indi­vidual artistic language, as her auto­di­dactic approach gave her the freedom to develop outside of acad­emic norms and devise new, radical forms of expres­sion that could not be fitted into any styl­istic pigeon­hole.

One special trait of Carol Rama’s art is her fasci­na­tion with the outlandish and the way she toys with provo­ca­tion. Her early work, consisting of water­colors from the 1930s and 1940s, already depicts scenes that broke with all the conven­tions inherent to a Catholic and fascist-influ­enced Italy: Scenes in a psychi­atric ward became motifs in the paint­ings as did a woman shit­ting or people mastur­bating or performing other sexual acts. Rama herself once said: “I have always been fasci­nated by things and situ­a­tions that other people found unac­cept­able.” It is there­fore hardly surprising that she is often included in research on femi­nist discourse given that her works not only repre­sent a trans­gres­sion of social taboos but also a rebel­lion against the patri­ar­chal perspec­tive that views women as passive objects.

Rama was not only adept at staging her art, but also at presenting her own person. She liked to recount stories from her life that suggest a biograph­ical inter­pre­ta­tion of her works: for example, when she uses the name of the psychi­atric women’s clinic where her mother stayed temporarily in the title of her work “I due Pini”, or names works after members of her family, whose tragic lives she was all too ready to describe. That said, it often remains unclear whether her anec­dotes are poetic exten­sions of her art or whether her works are poetic treat­ments of her life. Rama herself once said, “every­thing and nothing” was “biograph­ical”. Life and work, truth and fiction merge in her oeuvre – almost as if she had specif­i­cally sought to over­come these bound­aries.

One partic­u­larly compelling but unver­i­fied anec­dote about the rebel­lious artist relates to her first solo exhi­bi­tion. According to Rama, the show in 1945 in Turin which report­edly presented mainly erotic water­colors caused a scandal that resulted in its imme­diate closure. The depic­tion of naked, partly frag­mented female bodies in sexual poses came to the atten­tion of the Vatican, which imme­di­ately lodged a complaint. The situ­a­tion was quite unac­cept­able for the conser­v­a­tive author­i­ties and this, Rama suggested, ulti­mately led to the exhi­bi­tion being censored. It was not until more than 30 years later, in 1979, that the provoca­tive water­colors were once again presented to the public – again in Turin and this time compre­hen­sively docu­mented.

Carol Rama went through many artistic phases and rein­vented herself time and again. She changed her style virtu­ally every ten years: begin­ning with the early figu­ra­tive, erotic water­colors and almost face­less anti-portraits, then in the 1950s as a member of the Movi­mento Arte Conc­reta (MAC) she initially turned to abstrac­tion, before devoting herself to various mate­rial exper­i­ments in the 1960s and 1970s. These were in turn replaced in the following decade by a resump­tion and advance­ment of figu­ra­tive, picto­rial themes and draw­ings.

In the 1960s, Carol Rama began exper­i­menting with indus­trial mate­rials such as rubber, metal, doll’s eyes and other everyday objects, which once again attracted the atten­tion of the art scene. Her “brico­lages”, a term her friend Edoardo Sanguineti had adopted from Claude Lévi-Strauss and applied to Rama’s new series of works, expanded the idea of classic collage to include the free use of spray paint, adhe­sives and assem­bled objects. This inno­v­a­tive approach set new stan­dards in contem­po­rary art. In the 1970s, Rama continued her mate­rial exper­i­ments, by using bicycle and car tire tubes for the “Gomme” body of work. The biomor­phic shapes and skin-like mate­ri­ality lend the works a sensual quality, which marked a break with the previ­ously strict compo­si­tions and estab­lished Rama as a radical inno­vator.

Carol Rama was by no means an outsider. A glance at the count­less photos in her studio reveals the inspiring social circles in which she moved: In addi­tion to a large number of well-known person­al­i­ties from the Italian art and intel­lec­tual scene such as the archi­tect and designer Carlo Mollino or composer Luciano Berio, May Ray can also be seen. The quirky artist devel­oped a special friend­ship with the famous surre­alist photog­ra­pher. Their many conver­sa­tions, letters and joint travels served to deci­sively influ­ence both artists’ devel­op­ment.

Although Carol Rama was a well-known figure within the Italian art and intel­lec­tual scene it was not until late on that she received inter­na­tional recog­ni­tion for her wide-ranging oeuvre. One reason for this were the patri­ar­chal struc­tures in the art busi­ness, which for a long time made it diffi­cult for female artists like her to achieve greater visi­bility. It was not until 2003, at the age of 85, that she won the Golden Lion at the Bien­nale di Venezia for her life’s work – at a time when the debate about the female body and gender roles was becoming increas­ingly impor­tant and Rama had already exhib­ited five times at the Bien­nale.

Carol Rama’s art has always revolved around such universal issues as sexu­ality, lust, illness, and death. With her radical, often merci­less view of these aspects of life she ques­tioned society’s norms and created works that were ahead of their time. Rama’s explo­ration of these subjects became an impor­tant source of inspi­ra­tion for younger gener­a­tions of artists, who tackled similar issues from a decid­edly femi­nist perspec­tive.

Carol Rama lived and worked in her loft apart­ment at Via Napione 15 in Turin for over 70 years. Her home was both a studio and a trea­sure trove, full of everyday objects that she inte­grated into her art. What is more, her apart­ment itself became a work of art, so to speak, in which her creative spirit could flourish freely: Nor did there seem to be any sepa­ra­tion between art and life there. The studio, which the Italian edition of Vogue featured as a gesamtkunst­werk, later became a hot tip for tourists after it was opened to the general public for the first time in 2019.