Carol Rama

Carol Rama (born April 17, 1918, Turin, Italy—died September 25, 2015, Turin) was a self-taught Italian artist who achieved great public success later in life with her evocative and psychologically intense depictions of women that celebrated an overt eroticism.

Rama was the youngest daughter of Amabile Rama, a small-scale manufacturer in Turin’s bicycle and automobile industry, and his wife, Marta. Rama’s early years were marked by economic and personal upheaval. Her father’s company went bankrupt while she was a child (he would commit suicide in 1942), and her mother was admitted to a psychiatric clinic in 1933, followed by her legal separation from Rama’s father. Rama began working diligently as an artist about 1933, largely in watercolour on paper, with raw and intuitive explorations of the body that were both expressionist and psychological. Images of women without limbs, clinics with restraining beds, and a depiction of her nude mother defecating all reflect a consciousness under stress: “I paint as therapy,” she observed in 1981.

Although Rama received no formal or academic training, she did strike up an important friendship with Felice Casorati, the foremost painter in Turin at that time. Though Casorati provided Rama with encouragement rather than training, he did expose her to the workings of the art world and set in motion Rama’s move toward her first public exhibition in 1945. That exhibition, held at the Galleria Faber in Turin, has become the stuff of legend: it was closed by the Turin police for obscenity before it opened; her work was confiscated; and some, it is said, was destroyed. Rama continued to exhibit her work throughout Italy in the following decades (including the Venice Biennales of 1948, 1950, and 1956) and formed close friendships with the Italian poet Edoardo Sanguineti and American expatriate Surrealist artist Man Ray.

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By the 1970s, when her work had largely moved toward abstraction, she had begun to achieve wider recognition and exhibited in France, Germany, Sweden, and the United States, where her acquaintances included Andy Warhol, Orson Welles, and Liza Minnelli. A major reconsideration of her work as a self-taught visionary artist occurred in the 1980s when Italian critic and curator Lea Vergine saw in Rama’s early work themes that contemporary feminism had reinvigorated: a haunting and complex reclaiming of the female body from the male gaze and an attendant embrace of its sexuality. That new interpretation—accompanied by a broader mainstreaming of self-taught artists, who earlier in the century had usually been described as folk, naïve, or outsider and had later been called nonacademic, self-taught, or visionary—led to international acclaim for Rama, as manifested in several large retrospectives (including in Amsterdam in 1998 and Turin in 2003). She received the Golden Lion award for lifetime achievement at the Venice Biennale in 2003, and a 2014 traveling exhibition of her work opened in Barcelona.

Rama’s later work featured less-traditional art materials—works since 1970 included, for example, nail polish, sandpaper, leather, felt, rubber bicycle tubing, industrial gaskets, and so on—but her motivation remained largely the same, as she noted in 1992:

I’m a frightened person. My security only exists in front of a sheet of paper that has to be filled. Work is the only way of getting rid of my fears. My transgression is in painting.