Carol Rama.
A Rebel of Modernity

The first room brings together central works from different groups that all share fiery red tones, giving viewers an initial impres­sion of the diver­sity of Rama’s oeuvre. Along­side high-impact works such as “Senza titolo (Maternità)” (Unti­tled [Mater­nity], 1966), in which the artist crowns a vulva-like form with small dolls’ eyes, impasto abstract works are on view here as well as object montages, rather deli­cate brico­lages on paper, and a textile piece.

The next room is devoted to a series of erotic water­colors dating from 1936 to 1946. Even as a young artist, Rama took the liberty of depicting the unspeak­able and defying the prevailing rules. She liked to tell how a planned showing of this series in Turin around 1945 was not even allowed to open due to censor­ship, so that the water­colors were not shown publicly until 1979. The series deals with esoteric, hidden themes, with freedom and oppres­sion, social bound­aries and their trans­gres­sion. Many of the scenes take place in a psychi­atric ward. Recur­ring motifs include protruding tongues, mastur­ba­tion, vulvas, body parts, pros­theses, and also ordi­nary everyday objects such as razors, dentures, shovels, brushes, and shoes. According to Rama, these works express in part her direct response to drastic events early in her own life, such as her mother’s stay in a psychi­atric ward and her father’s bank­ruptcy and presumed suicide. This inter­weaving of life and work gener­ates a narra­tive that would become a poetic exten­sion and an inte­gral part of her oeuvre. With this series, Rama leaves far behind her the bour­geois milieu of the conser­v­a­tive city of Turin where she grew up, against the back­drop of the Catholic Italy of the Fascist era, and firmly iden­ti­fies herself as an avant-garde artist.

In the late 1930s, she then produced a group of oil paint­ings that stand in stark contrast to the water­colors. These reserved, melan­cholic portraits and self-portraits are flat, almost disem­bodied, in appear­ance. In contrast, for example, to the portraits of women by the Turin painter Felice Caso­rati, a close friend and patron of Rama’s from an early age, these paint­ings push the portrait genre to the brink of disso­lu­tion. Just a few lines delin­eate a nose or mouth, as in “Senza titolo (Autori­tratto)” (Unti­tled [Self-Portrait]) from 1937. In “Sguardo” (Gaze) and “Senza Titolo” (Unti­tled, 1947), the face in the portrait remains blank, and “Senza Titolo” (Unti­tled, 1944/45) shows a barely recog­niz­able figure made up of green patches of paint, behind which a flick­ering orange blazes ominously.

In 1953, Rama joined the Movi­mento Arte Conc­reta. Founded in Milan in 1948 by artists including Gillo Dorfles and Bruno Munari, the move­ment had a satel­lite in Turin led by Rama’s friend the artist and critic Albino Galvano. As in Germany, artists came together here under the vague banner of abstrac­tion in order to distance them­selves from the fascist imper­a­tive of a real­istic aesthetic. Rama was a member of the artists’ group until the early 1960s, a unique exper­i­ment in her career. During this period, she produced abstract, almost musi­cally composed works in oil, on paper, and with textiles including a carpet. “La linea di sete” (The Dry Spell, 1954) and “Compo­sizione” (Compo­si­tion, 1959) display rhythmic struc­tures in a color scheme typical for the era.

The early 1960s saw the begin­ning of one of Rama’s most inci­sive work phases, that of the “brico­lages”. Adopting a term coined by Claude Lévi-Strauss, Rama’s poet friend Edoardo Sanguineti used this word to describe Rama’s working method, which was pred­i­cated on the possi­bil­i­ties of asso­cia­tive processes and free combi­na­tion. While her earlier works were more conven­tional in their mate­ri­ality, now she exper­i­mented with the creative options offered by collage and the liberal use of adhe­sives, enamel, spray paint, and pastels. At the same time, she expanded the two-dimen­sional picture ground by mounting objects onto the canvas, including cut-off paint tubes, dolls’ eyes, and medical syringes, as well as natural mate­rials such as small twigs, skins, or animal claws. The use of unusual mate­rials and everyday objects would also be embraced by the artists of Nouveau Réalisme and Arte Povera, currents that emerged some­what later in Turin. In Rama’s brico­lages, by contrast, these objects are like reflec­tions of the reper­toire of motifs in her early water­colors and now appear concretely in the picto­rial space. Occa­sion­ally, as in “XCV – C’è un altro metodo, per finire” (XCV – There is another method for reaching the end, 1967), they are contrasted with math­e­mat­ical formulas and phys­ical calcu­la­tions as well as text frag­ments.

In the show at the SCHIRN, Rama’s black works are given their own sepa­rate space. The artist produced several groups of works in which the image is devel­oped out of black­ness. In their simplicity and radi­calism, these works are remi­nis­cent of Kazimir Male­vich’s “Black Square” (1915) and US Abstract Expres­sionism as exem­pli­fied by Ad Rein­hardt and Robert Rauschen­berg towards the end of the 1940s. Here, Rama breaks through the sober austerity of the color scheme by linking it to profane themes. In the early mixed-media painting “Riso Nero” (Black Rice, 1960), for example, she combines a mono­chrome black picture with grains of rice, the food­stuff of the Po Valley, which she has covered in black paint. And “Ricor­dati di quegli anni e li fa schizzar via” (Remember these years, and you let them vanish, 1967) takes the form of a veri­table vortex of impasto black paint within which the artist has set several groups of dolls’ eyes.

In the early 1970s, Rama turned to a new group of works, the so-called “Gomme”. These mini­malist pictures are made of bicycle and car tire tubes in different colors, mounted flat on the canvas in “Spazio anche più che tempo” (Space even more than time, 1970) or hung in a bundle in front of the picture surface in “Movi­mento e immo­bilità di Birnam” (Move­ment and stand­still in Birnam, 1977). The skin-like mate­rial and biomor­phic forms break up the strict compo­si­tions and lend them a sensual and playful quality. With these poor quotidian mate­rials, Rama also estab­lished a connec­tion to her own biog­raphy—to her father’s factory for car parts. In some of the works in the series, such as “Autorat­tris­ta­trice” (1970; the title is a pun on “auto” = self, and “rattris­trare” = to make sad), as well as in earlier “brico­lages”, Rama’s interest in poli­tics is evident. Her so-called “napalm pictures” were a somber response to the Vietnam War, refer­ring to bodies burnt by the biolog­ical weapon.

Like the Transa­van­guardia in Italy, repre­sented by painters such as Francesco Clemente, which turned back to figu­ra­tion and conven­tional mate­rials in the late 1970s, Rama like­wise began to return to figu­ra­tive work in the 1980s but combined it with her tried and tested prin­ciple of found mate­rials. Now she made use of docu­ments, tech­nical draw­ings, floor plans, and city maps of Turin in her art, also incor­po­rating char­ac­ters from her earlier works. Crowned naked female figures, mystical crea­tures, the ampu­tated torso, indi­vidual body parts, animals, and fantasy figures are gath­ered together here in eerie, cryptic, and asso­cia­tive works that once again contain allu­sions to Rama’s biog­raphy and people in her life.