Carol Rama

1918–Turin–2015

Carol Rama was born in Turin in 1918 and began painting in her late teens. Entirely self-taught, she started with the erotic watercolours of the Appassionata series, with their prostheses and unbound bodies, a style and subject so honest that her first exhibition, held in Turin in 1945, was censored before it opened. She spent the decades that followed moving through abstraction and into the bricolage works for which she is now best known, assemblages of found objects, doll's eyes, taxidermy claws, syringes and electrical wire, in which disparate materials were refigured into compositions examining the mind and the body.

From around 1970 she worked with bicycle inner tubes, rubber and copper, materials that carried the memory of the coachbuilding firm her father had run in the city. Across seven decades her subject held steady, an enduring preoccupation with eros, the body and decay. Recognition arrived in 2003, with the Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement at the Venice Biennale, and from 2014 the retrospective The Passion According to Carol Rama travelled to major institutions across Europe. She died in Turin in 2015.

Works

• Untitled — 1968
• Untitled — 1966
• Untitled — 1964
• Untitled — 1963
• Spazio anche più che tempo — 1972
• Porte Bonheur — 1960
• La guerra è astratta — 1971
• Untitled — 1964