Carol Rama’s obstinate and surversive art on show in Bologna

Restlessness was Rama’s vital impulse. A new exhibition presents her multiples created between 1993 and 2004, alongside rare archival materials.

Olga Carolina Rama's obstinacy was already written in her date of birth, that April 17th 1918, which, because of a perhaps superstitious aversion to the unlucky number, the artist falsifies in all her biographies, attesting to being born on the 16th or 18th of the month.

The tendency toward subversion animates her artistic production from the very beginning – from the explicit sexual connotation of her early paintings to the closure for obscenity of her first solo show at the Faber gallery in Turin in 1945. That same tendency will become more ardent and conscious, fortified by maturity and experience, preserving itself until the last, peculiar artistic phase recounted in the exhibition at Villa delle Rose, in Bologna's Saragozza district.

Carol Rama in Franco Masoero’s studio. Photo Alexandra Wetzel

It is 1993 and Rama is seventy-five years old when she meets the Turin-based publisher, printer and gallery owner Franco Masoero. It is from this collaboration that the precious corpus of multiples on display in the exhibition was born, which, challenging and playing with the very concepts of repetition and uniqueness, re-enacts the entire imagery that had permeated the paintings, drawings and collages of her youth. Portraits, shattered bodies, ordinary objects are still at the center of a creative process that is based on a few but characterizing elements: the essentiality of drawing, the elegance of the line, the subtlety of irony. Carol Rama intervenes on the printed sheets by conserving the shades of watercolors or nail polishes, endlessly joking about the austerity of a sheet that, according to the rules of traditional chalcography, should remain untouched.

Carol Rama, Keaton, 1998. Collage of bicycle inner tube on engraving Idilli III measuring 39.5 x 42 cm. Edition: 7, copy “Keaton 4/7”. © Archivio Carol Rama, Torino

Strongly autobiographical, she spends years recounting affections, habits and sensations, leaving to drawing and painting the task of scanning her life between family presences and absences – the bond with her grandmother Carolina, her father's probable suicide, her mother's internment in a Turin psychiatric hospital. She makes restlessness her vital impulse, torment the engine of her creativity. Even from pain she manages to derive the most ardent flame, allowing herself to get burned again and again. .

She makes restlessness her vital impulse, torment the engine of her creativity.

The choice to remain always isolated from the great movements of the art system was constant and conscious for her. Never willing to give up that total absence of rules, formal as much as theoretical, she found in her independence a continuous stimulus, a push toward an exploratory horizon of which, in fact, she never saw the end.
It was MAC (Movimento Arte Concreta) the only group to which, in the 1950s, she chose to bind herself. Not because of a search for certainties, but rather to reaffirm and take to the limit her own distance from any obligation. She thus threw herself into the most radical abstractionism, leaving the figurative aside. Everything Carol Rama produces comes from within, and materializes outside.

Carol Rama, La mucca pazza / The Mad Cow (M.P.22), 2002. Line etching and aquatint on Muguet Duchêne paper, 28 x 22.5 cm. Edition: 12, watercoloured by the artist after printing. Copy 1/12. © Archivio Carol Rama, Torino

The explosion and vibrations of her painting dry up in the exhibition, which offers instead the skeleton, the root –  the matrix, in fact – of an artistic vision that starts from the detail, from the innermost secret, to drag it out of the intimate dimension with a mocking smile plastered on her face.
Refined and ungraceful at the same time, Carol Rama manifested her personal anarchy with a composure that made her greater and louder. Impossible not to see the most obscene Schiele in her nudes and vulvas, the same broken and tangled lines in a body that is so melancholy that it seems to be shattered by the gaze.

Alongside her highest success –  the Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement at the 2003 Venice Biennale –  lies that of having been part of the “lazaret of queens” that Italian curator Lea Vergine brought to the 1980 exhibition “L’altra metà dell’Avanguardia. 1910-1940” in Milan: it was a watershed for the history of 20th-century Italian art, which revealed to critics and historians the revolutionary scope of the many women artists till then silenced by an ancient, blind and harmful torpor. 

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