Carol Rama

Carol Rama, a self-taught Italian artist, explored themes of sexuality and identity through her paintings, often referencing female sensuality.

Artist Carol Rama: A Journey Through Her Life

Carol Rama's biography represents a complex path that has profoundly influenced her work. She was born in Turin, Italy, in 1918. At the age of 12, she experienced a severe breakdown and spent some time as a day patient at a hospital. This experience profoundly impacted her, as did the people she met there. When she was 15, her mother, who struggled with mental health issues, was committed to a psychiatric hospital, and her father committed suicide after his small bicycle factory went bankrupt.

She enrolled at the art academy but quickly realized that formal education was not her path. She frequently skipped classes and eventually dropped out. From the beginning, she intuitively developed her own confident style, distinctive line quality, unique subject matter, and unconventional perspective. Rama's earliest works are distinguished by their bold and specific vision.

Beginning in 1936, Carol Rama created drawings depicting truncated, mutilated bodies, and isolated body parts. Her first exhibition was banned by the Christian-Democrat government, which was scandalized by the overtly sexual and provocative nature of her works.

After the war, like many Italian artists, the artist shifted towards abstraction, viewing it as an opportunity to bring a new rigor to her compositions.

By the early 1950s, Carol Rama's artwork was irregular geometric compositions featuring lilting rhomboids and squares, often connected by long spidery lines or forming directional fields of implied movement. In 1970, she began incorporating bicycle inner tubes into her work. After more than thirty years of developing potent strains of abstraction, Rama returned to figuration. In 1979, her provocative works from the 1930s and 1940s, previously censored by the authorities, were finally exhibited for the first time.

Mostly unknown outside of Italy, Carol Rama's art was brought into the spotlight by curator Lea Vergine. The 1980s were years of recognition for her. 

The artist died in 2015, leaving behind a profound legacy of works. Two years later, in 2017, the world saw a survey of her works titled "Carol Rama: Antibodies." This exhibition brought together over one hundred of Rama's paintings, objects, and works on paper.

Carol Rama's Paintings: Unveiling Her Artistic Vision

The artist started painting around the mid-1930s and began exhibiting her work a decade later. Her paintings encompassed themes of eroticism and sexual identity, often referencing female sensuality explicitly. Often depicting bizarre or visceral scenes, such as snakes being birthed from a woman’s genitals, the artist's work emerged from a profound need to express inner anguish.

Her earliest watercolor paintings from the 1930s depict psychosexual fantasies inspired by her mother's time in a psychiatric institution. In the 1960s, Rama explored themes of the body and abjection through her materials, embedding glass eyes, human teeth, and syringes into canvas, which inspired Sanguineti to coin the term "bricolage." By the 1970s, she was crafting corporeal sculptures from the rubber innards of bike tires, a nod to her father's bicycle factory and his tragic suicide.

She aligned closely with the Movimiento Arte Concreta of Atanasio Soldati, Gilles Dorfles, and Bruno Munari, advocating for a painting detached from any reference to reality. Rooted in the Turin art scene, her works grappled with postwar anxieties, including themes of the atom bomb and the Cold War. Rama also experimented with large formats, incorporating used inner tubes cut into geometric motifs or suspended horizontally, utilizing the rubber's irregularities to imbue these compositions with a distinct material quality.

Carol Rama's studio became an extension of herself, embodying her persona and her unique artistic visions. It was a blend of a museum, asylum, apothecary, reliquary, and anthropological archive. 

Carol Rama for sale: Explore and Acquire

The artist's works still captivate the minds of fans and collectors and continue to be exhibited at auctions around the world. Carol Rama's prints, drawings, and other works vary in price from several hundred dollars to tens of thousands or more.

For example, Carol Rama's painting "Bricolage" (1967) costs 120,000 euros. Another work, "Senza titolo - 4 ritratti" (1994), costs 6,000 euros. One more artwork, "Malelingue," was sold for 3,600 euros.

Curious collectors can also purchase books about Carol Rama, which detail her life path, analyze her style, and include exhibition catalogs.