BERN.- Sexuality, madness, illness and death are the big themes that the Turin artist Carol Rama (1918–2015) addressed in her work. Like many other outstanding avant-garde women artists, she achieved recognition late in life, among other things with the Golden Lion of the 50th Venice Biennale in 2003. Between 7 March and 13 July 2025, the Kunstmuseum Bern is giving this non-conformist and pioneer of feminist art her first major retrospective in Switzerland. With around 110 works from a 70-year career, Carol Rama. A Rebel of Modernity presents the many facets of a body of work marked by rebellion, radicalism, an experimental spirit and a diversity of materials. Independent of schools and artistic groups, this self-taught artist created an unconventional, provocative and also very personal oeuvre that cannot easily be placed under any clear categories.


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The influence of her own biography: sexuality, madness, illness and death Sexuality, madness, illness and death are the big human themes running through her work.

‘For me work, painting, was always something that made me feel less unhappy, less poor, less ugly and even less ignorant… I paint to heal myself.’ --- Carol Rama interviewed by Corrado Levi and Filippo Fassati in: C. Levi, P. and F. Fossati and I. Schaffner, ‘Carolrama’, in Impresa per l’arte contemporanea, 4 January 1997, no page number.

The artist was born in Turin in 1918, the youngest daughter of Marta and Amabile Rama. Her father’s firm made car parts and initially allowed the family to lead a middle-class lifestyle. During her adolescence, Carol Rama experienced her parents being placed in psychiatric institutions. When she visited her mother in the clinic I Due Pini, she became increasingly resistant to socially imposed rules and pressures, gender categories and gender roles, as well as notions of female sexuality. Her father died in 1942, probably from suicide after his firm went bankrupt.

An artist who constantly reinvented herself

In the early 1940s Carol Rama moved into her studio apartment in Turin, which would become the lifelong centre of her artistic work and a meeting place for intellectuals and creative people. Carol Rama developed new artistic approaches every ten years or so. In the exhibition these are presented in six chapters, each devoted to a particular phase of her output. The prelude to the exhibition consists of central works in black and red from different phases of her career.

Appassionata: painting as provocation and rebellion

In the mid-1930s Rama decided to become an artist, and to counter the dominance of men in art and in everyday life. Her series of erotic watercolours Appassionata (The passionate one), produced between 1936 and 1946, catapulted her into the centre of the avant-garde. In these works, she focused on bodies, gender and sexuality in the context of social norms.

Naked figures are shown in a moment of extreme vulnerability, yet they emanate a strong sense of autonomy. They are female rebels – like the artist herself. The watercolours were due to be exhibited in Turin in 1945. But according to the artist, even before it opened, the exhibition was closed on police instructions for obscenity. With these works, Rama left the middle-class conservative environment in which she had grown up, and Catholic Italy under fascism, far behind, and paved the way for contemporary feminist art.

Anti-portrait: reduced expressivity

From the mid-1930s to the mid-1940s, in parallel with this, Rama produced oil paintings on canvas, most of them portraits or self-portraits. She largely liberated the portrait from resemblance to the model. Reduced in their expressivity, the figures look flat, almost disembodied, a collection of coloured patches. Some lose their shape, merge with grotesque and surreal elements, and turn into hybrid beings.

Movimento Arte Concreta: the further journey to abstraction

After the end of the Second World War, artists around the world turned towards abstraction. To distinguish itself from the art of fascism, with its realistic aesthetic, non-figurative art with an abstract-geometrical pictorial language also gained in importance in Italy. Rama joined the group Movimento Arte Concreta. She now found her way to a clear, abstract pictorial language, and began experimenting with different media.

Bricolage: experiments with material as protest

In the early 1960s Carol Rama opened up the flat canvas and extended it with objects from her everyday life. In a time of social and political upheaval, critique of consumerism and protest against traditional western art history, art and the everyday were to be brought together. This radical demand was also being made by the artists of Arte Povera, which later formed in Turin. Rama painted with glue, enamel, oil and spray paint, she used iron filings, paint tubes, dolls’ eyes and much else. In 1964 the poet Edoardo Sanguineti, a close friend of Rama, described her experiments with material as bricolage (DIY). This everyday concept, to which Claude Lévi-Strauss gave a theoretical charge, went on to establish itself in western art history.

Gomme

From the early 1970s onwards, Carol Rama’s work was distinguished by almost minimalist compositions. In her group of Gomme (tyres), she mounted opened bicycle or car tyres on canvases, making form, space and time her theme. However Rama broke through the minimalist severity and created multilayered, ambivalent works with an intense physical presence. In Turin, dominated as it is by the Fiat car factory, there was no shortage of used rubber. These works also contain memories of her father and his firm.

Late return to figuration

In the 1980s Carol Rama returned to figurative representation. The Transavanguardia movement was coming into being in Italy. Its painters devoted themselves once again to traditional media and motifs such as panel painting and figures from classical mythology. These tendencies are also apparent in Rama’s works. In the 1970s, she met the gallerist Luciano Anselmino, who already represented Man Ray and Andy Warhol at his Galleria Il Fauno in Turin – and soon represented Rama as well.

A long journey to recognition

Carol Rama achieved recognition late in her career. In 1980 her work was shown in the ground-breaking group exhibition L’altra metà dell’avanguardia 1910–1940 (The Other Half of the Avant-Garde 1910–1940) held by Lea Vergine in the Palazzo Reale in Milan. The artist commented on being awarded the Golden Lion at the 50th Venice Biennale in 2003 in the following terms:

‘It pissed me off, sure, because if I really am so good, then I don’t get why I had to starve for so long, even if I am a woman.’ -- Carol Rama, quoted in Lea Vergine, L’angoscia è un trip, in: Exh. Cat. Milan, 1985, p. 45



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