Carol Rama
(Turin 1918) is an autobiographical artist. Every person, every object that
appears in her works is matched in Carol’s story and memories. Truncated
female bodies, false teeth, beds, wheel-chairs, animals, shoes and other
similar objects are the subjects of her first watercolours, which, when they
first appeared (1936-46), were so anachronistic as to be unacceptable (her
first one-man show in 1945 was closed, and the works impounded). These works
reflect the angst and fantasies of a young woman, faced all of a sudden with
the most traumatic aspects of life, after a rather protected childhood in
the family home.
In the 1950s Carol felt the need to escape the boundaries of autobiography
and became part of Turin’s MAC group (Movimento Arte Concreta), working out
her personal concept of abstraction. From the 1960s her research once more
turned to delve into intimate depths, uniting the reality of used objects
with her intrinsic pictorial creativity. Paintings resulted, called
bricolages [do-it-yourselfs] by her friend Edoardo Sanguineti. He would
accompany Carol and her work from the beginning of the sixties with his
poetry and authentically bizarre presentations. Friends have always played a
large role in Carol’s life, beginning with people from her own city, Turin,
such as Felice Casorati, Albino Galvano, Italo Calvino, Massimo Mila, Carlo
Mollino and many others. During trips in the 1970s to Paris and New York
with her dealer Anselmino she met Andy Warhol, Orson Welles and especially
Man Ray, who she continued to see frequently until his death.
Carol Rama’s work from the 1970s was both intimate and wide-ranging: she
spread the inner tubes of bicycle tyres on often very large formats,
recalling her father’s bicycle factory. Often worn, repaired and full of
patchs, these tubes create a living pictorial surface, with a visual and
tactile effect similar to human skin.
In 1980, the artist had a fundamentally important meeting with Lea Vergine,
who included Carol in the travelling exhibition on great twentieth-century
artists, entitled L'altra metà dell'avanguardia [The Other Half of
the Avant-Garde], with many of her works from the 1930s and 1940s. Thanks to
Lea Vergine her first anthological exhibition was staged in 1983 in the
Sagrato of Milan Cathedral. Finally the work of her early years was
appreciated, and this is perhaps one of the reasons why Carol returned in
the beginning of the eighties back to figuration and works full of fantasy,
quirkiness, hinted tales and allusions to myths and legends. Carol Rama
never abandoned figurative work again, though over time the figures and
characters - always linked to her personal story - have become more
essential, almost as though they were emblems.
Carol
Rama was now known within the limited circle of contemporary art
enthusiasts. Public recognition on a large scale only arrived in 2003, when
she was awarded the Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement at the 50th Venice
Biennale. In 2004 the Sandretto Re Rebaudengo Foundation in Turin staged a
large anthological exhibition of her work, which subsequently travelled to
the Mart in Rovereto, Italy, and the Baltic Museum of Gateshead in Britain.
The city museum of Ulm (Germany) and the Galerie im Taxispalais in Innsbruck
(Austria) also organised a large retrospective exhibition of her work in
2004-2005. The exhibition Trama doppia took place during summer 2006
at Alghero in Sardinia, a one-man show of Carol Rama’s work hung by the
artist-designer Antonio Marras. The catalogue raisonné of Carol
Rama’s engraved work was published in the autumn of 2006, presented on the
occasion of the anthological exhibition of Rama’s engravings at the Ca’
Pesaro Museum of Modern Art in Venice