Carol Rama (1918–2015) is one of those outstanding female artists of modernism who, in spite of impressive and multifaceted oeuvres, achieved fame late in their career. From October 11, 2024, to February 2, 2025, the Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt is presenting a large-scale survey of the Turin-based artist for the first time in Germany, featuring some 120 exhibits from all phases of her remarkable body of work.
Sexuality, passion, disease, death—Rama dedicated her art to the great human themes and fundamental experiences. Her depictions from the 1930s of female lust paved the way for today’s feminist art. Independent of artistic schools and groupings, the self-taught talent created over the course of 70 years an unconventional and highly personal oeuvre. Rama’s work defies simple categorization and is distinguished by an enthusiastic delight in experimentation. From her early days as an artist in the 1930s through to the early 2000s, she managed to reinvent her style every ten years or so with new groups of works, while always remaining true to herself. An adept iconoclast, she pushed the boundaries of artistic and social conventions in terms of both form and content. Rama spent her long life in Turin, in an apartment that also served as her studio on the top floor of 15 Via Napione that she had designed as a total work of art in its own right. Wellconnected, she gathered around her a circle of intellectuals and artists and yet for a long time remained more or less unknown outside Italy. It was not until she had reached an advanced age that she was recognized with international survey exhibitions and prestigious awards including the Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement at the 2003 Venice Biennale.
The exhibition at the Schirn provides an overview of Rama’s complete oeuvre, including major works from all phases of her career, notably her now legendary early watercolors, hauntingly expressive portraits in oil on canvas, abstract paintings from her time as a member of the Movimento Arte Concreta (MAC), sensational mixed-media paintings and object montages in the Surrealist tradition, minimalist works made of fabric and industrial materials, and late paintings and drawings that revisit figuration. Divided into a total of eight chapters, the developments of Rama's oeuvre is further contextualised by photographic works by Bepi Ghiotti that portray Rama's Turin home-studio, elaborating the inextricable link between the artist's life and her work.
The exhibition is organized by Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt in cooperation with Kunstmuseum Bern; supported by the Dr. Marschner Stiftung and the Verein der Freunde der Schirn Kunsthalle, with additional support from the Georg und Franziska Speyer’sche Hochschulstiftung.
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