The Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo continues its ‘year of the woman’ with a unique retrospective exhibition of the Italian artist Carol Rama, curated by Guido Curto and Giorgio Verzotti. The show offers a complete insight into the artistic production of Carol Rama, now in her eighties, and winner of the Golden Lion Award at the 50th edition of the Venice Biennale.Around 150 paintings is presented at the exhibition, some for the first time, along with 20 engravings, all of which were made from 1936 up to today. The works are characterised by an extreme knowledge and strength of the artist’s chosen field – and that are astonishingly contemporary - which explore the theme of female identity with explicit reference to the body and female sensuality.The exhibition has been co-produced by the Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo and MART – Museum of Modern and Contemporary art of Trento and Rovereto, where it will be presented from 11 September to 28 November 2004. “The Fondazione has decided to promote a Turin artist of international stature who has only now received her well-deserved recognition” explains the President of the Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, Patrizia Sandretto Re Rebaudengo. “Carol Rama’s work is innovative and young. Age is of no importance, what matters is the quality of her work and how closely connected it is to the world we live in today. The strength of this artist lies in her great capacity to have anticipated many of the current trends in contemporary art.” The Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, set up to promote the new generation of artists, has decided to honour an artist now in her eighties, one of the most mysterious figures of the art world in the last half a century: Carol Rama. This decision was made because Carol Rama, despite her age, symbolises the idea of an artist who never ages with the passing of time but who always draws new strengths and incentives from society to transform and defeat her own time. Dedicating a great retrospective in Italy and in Turin to the artist Carol Rama also signifies giving young artists who are starting out in the art world an insight into what it means to be an artist: not always being well-known, economically successful, on the front page of a magazine... but what it does show is a coherent vision of one’s own work. In this perspective, the exhibition not only enters into the Fondazione’s philosophy of showing young artists but also teaches young artists how to stay young in art through trust and faith in their own ideas. Carol Rama represents the first of a generation of artists who have never stopped researching and defining their own female identity with such a great strength and determination. And, during a year in which the Fondazione have decided to concentrate on the story of the woman in a cultural context, Carol Rama is, without a doubt, the symbol of this very special and long-awaited programme.
Olga Carolina Rama, known as Carol Rama in the art world, was born in Turin on 17 April 1918. In the thirties she frequented the studio of the artist Felice Casorati (1883-1963) and it was here where the self-taught artist began painting her portraits with simple features, which today could be compared to the so-called style of Bad Painting. In the forties she used watercolours on paper to depict her female nudes, tied to hospital beds, with bodies amputated at the joints surrounded by swirling false arms, legs and dentures. Works like la Nonna Carolina (1936) and Appassionata (1941) come from this, and anticipate by many years the neo avant-garde contemporaries such as the Post-Humans. In the fifties she took part in the abstract movement of MAC (Movement of Concrete Art) and showed this work at the Venice Biennials of 1948 and 1950. In the sixties her work became more figurative with that of Bricolage, compositions in which we see glass eyes, teeth and nails embedded in her painted canvases. After this, her works became more like installations with bicycle wheel pink-coloured inner tubes laid onto the canvas like skin, guts and phalluses. In the eighties and nineties, Carol Rama’s images showed us new protagonists: The Mad Cow, Birnam and Buster Keaton. Subjects that were painted or drawn on old maps or pieces of used paper with technical drawings of industrial machinery on them.
