Introduction
Sexuality, madness, illness and death are the major subjects that Carol Rama (1918–2015) addresses in her art. Like many of Modernism’s outstanding female artists she only gained recognition very late. Commenting on being awarded the Golden Lion at the 50th Venice Biennale in 2003 she stated: “This, naturally, makes me furious, because if I’m really that good, I don’t understand why I had to go hungry for so long, even if I am a woman”.
During the mid-1930s, the young woman from Turin decided to become an artist and to challenge the dominance of men in both everyday life and art. A series of erotic watercolours dates from the period, which not only established her later fame but also a reputation for fearlessness in her art. Carol Rama addresses the body, gender and sexuality in terms of social norms. She does so by depicting female identities in a direct and pleasurable way, breaking the ground for today’s feminist art. It is in these works that she leaves the conservative, bourgeois environment in which she grew up – Catholic Italy during the Fascist era – far behind her. Carol Rama assertively explained: “My rebellion is in painting”.
In not being subservient to any school or group of artists, Carol Rama was able to create an experimental, radical and personal body of work over the course of seventy years. She developed new approaches to her art roughly every ten years, which the exhibition is presenting in six chapters. The exhibition opens with key works in black and red from various periods of her oeuvre. Rama repeatedly began work from the blackness of the image, stating: “I’d paint everything black, it’s a kind of cremation, like a fantastic struggle with death. Black was always like a theatrical play, a way of painting that made me feel a little like a director able to create extraordinary scenarios.” In contrast, the artist considered red, “an erotic excitement, it lends a little despair to my deep fears, but it also heals them”.
Concurrently to her early watercolours, Carol Rama produced oil paintings, many of which were portraits or self-portraits. From the 1950s onwards, she painted abstract-concrete works, subsequently opening the flat canvas to produce her first experimental paintings incorporating other materials. This led to the Bricolage group of works produced during the 1960s and Gomme (Tyres) during the 1970s. Eventually, during the 1980s, the artist returned to figuration. Even today, Carol Rama remains provocative not only in her depictions of pain and pleasure, but also in the impossibility of clearly categorising her art.
An exhibition organised by Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt in collaboration with Kunstmuseum Bern.