NEW YORK, NY.- Iwan Wirth, Manuela Wirth and Marc Payot, Presidents of Hauser & Wirth, announced today that the gallery will represent the Estate of Carol Rama alongside Galerie Isabella Bortolozzi, Berlin.
Over more than seven decades, Carol Rama (b. 1918, Turin; d. 2015) developed a radical body of work that addressed connections between desire, sacrifice, eroticism and repression. By constructing a visual cosmos where transgression leads to liberation, Rama countered assumptions about gender, sexuality and representation, offering a retort to the societal conventions and the prevailing far-right political ideologies that defined the fascist-dominated Italy of her youth. She set neither boundaries nor hierarchies between painting, drawing, sculpture and printmaking, pulling all of these mediums into her image universe. ‘My self-assurance exists only across from a sheet of paper that needs to be filled in,’ Rama once declared. ‘Work is the only way to drive off my fears. My rebellion consists of painting.’
Today, Rama is considered one of the most original and individualistic artists to emerge from the 20th Century. Yet while she exhibited regularly in Italy, her work was largely absent from international contemporary discourse until the late 1990s when it finally attracted interest among a new generation of artists, curators and critics. Rama’s art has since galvanized ever-expanding attention and avid scholarship. She was awarded the Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement at the Venice Biennale in 2003 and major solo exhibitions of her work have been presented at the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam (1998); MACBA, Barcelona (2014); Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris, Paris (2015); New Museum, New York City (2017); and Schirn Kunsthalle, Frankfurt (2024), among others.
Carol Rama’s first solo exhibition with Hauser & Wirth will open in May 2026 in New York.
Manuela Wirth said, ‘We are honored to welcome the Estate of Carol Rama to our gallery and collaborate closely with Galerie Isabella Bortolozzi to ensure that this extraordinary woman’s art is shared with new audiences around the world. Self-taught, fiercely independent and utterly untamed, Rama was a pioneer—she was unafraid to be as visceral and autobiographical as others were studied and protracted. Her legacy already is interwoven into the fabric of our gallery’s history through familial connection as we were first introduced to Carol’s art through my mother Ursula Hauser, a longtime champion. And we see such powerful connections between this artist’s concerns and those of other remarkable Hauser & Wirth artists, including Louise Bourgeois, Eva Hesse, Maria Lassnig and Lee Lozano who, like Carol, were underappreciated during their lifetimes and now are considered titans of art history. That so many of our younger gallery artists deeply admire Carol Rama is a sure signal that there will be very exciting dialogue and discovery ahead.'
Selected prominent museum collections which have holdings of Rama’s work include The Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago IL; Centre Pompidou, Paris, France; Collezione Intesa Sanpaolo, Milano, Italy; Galleria d’Arte Moderna, Bologna, Italy; GAM - Galleria Civica d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea, Turin, Italy; MACBA, Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona, Barcelona, Spain; MAM, Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris, Paris, France; MART, Rovereto, Italy; MEF Museo Ettore Fico, Turin, Italy; MoMA, The Museum of Modern Art, New York NY; Museo del Novecento, Milan, Italy; Sammlung Goetz, Munich, Germany; Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, Netherlands; Tate, London, UK; and Uffizi, Florence, Italy.
