Not necessarily the feeling of exclusion and of not belonging to the place where one lives is related to the uprooting of his own country. Often this is due to his experience and the lack of recognition in the forms of thought and expression that are related to an alleged “normalcy”. In the art world are frequent stories of artists who have lived this experience and who have sought in artistic expression a tool to assert their existence and their worldview. “I found that painting freed me from anguish” said Carol Rama, an artist who has a history, not only artistic, which testifies these difficulties. Long forgotten by official discourse of art history, the work of Carol Rama, spanning eight decades (1936-2006), challenges the dominant narrative and make a dissenting representation of female sexuality.
Carol Rama is an Italian artist born in Turin that never left her hometown. Her artistic history confirms the view of The Guerrilla Girls, a group of feminist artists of the 80s, who claimed that the advantages of being a female artist are summarized in knowing that your career can excel when you’re 80 years; to be sure that any kind of art you do will be classified “feminine”, and appear in the revised editions of the histories of art. In fact the work of this artist, who is 97 years old, was not recognized until 2003, when she received 85 years, the Golden Lion at the Venice Biennale. Why an artist as Carol Rama had to wait many years to be successful?
One answer might be that Carol Rama is a woman born in Italy in the early twentieth century in a historical period where a woman artist, and with a family history that, at best, could be described as complicated – a mother with psychiatric problems a father who committed suicide- didn’t enjoy great esteem. Carol Rama has no academic artistic training “My only teacher is sin,” she says, adding: “I paint by instinct and I paint by passion. And by anger and by violence and by sadness. And by some fetishism. And by joy and sadness together. And especially by irritation. ” Her production, which stretches over seven decades, is an anti-archive that allows to reconstruct the avant-garde movements of the twentieth century.
In the thirties and forties, she began to invent her own visual grammar through figurative watercolors with amputated limbs and erect tongues. These works of the first period rebel against the accepted ideals of gender, sexual and cognitive and physical normality imposed by Mussolini’s Italy, so that, when were exposed for the first time in 1945, they were censored for “obscenity” by the Italian government. Carol Rama passes through abstraction in the fifties; she approaches to informal and spatialism in the sixties with the creation of collages and organic maps made of eyes and nails of taxidermist, cannulas, mathematical signs, syringes and electrical connections.
At the end of the sixties, the Italian art scene is taken by male figures of “arte povera” with the exception of Marisa Merz. Woman-without-man, surrounded mostly by friends not linked to Arte Povera and / or homosexuals, Carol Rama is out of the Italian art scene in 1960-1970, but if we look closely at her work of this period, it is impossible not to see recurrent parallels with the “arte povera”. Excluded from this scene, her work remains invisible. In the seventies, Carol Rama reconnects with her biography through the intensity of materials using almost exclusively rubber from bicycle tires, a material well known because her father had a small bicycle factory in Turin. Dissects tires, transforming them into two-dimensional surfaces, creates forms through the assembly of different colors and textures. Her tires, aged by the light and time, deflated, flabby and decaying, are, like our bodies, ” organisms yet well-defined and vulnerable.”
In 1980, the art historian and critic Lea Vergine “discover” the work of Carol Rama and includes a selection of her early watercolors in the exhibition “The other half of vanguard 1910-1940”, which includes works by more than a hundred women artists. That “discovery” makes invisible again Carol Rama’s work in two ways: firstly, the “recognition” is related to her status as a “woman,” and on the other hand, paying more attention to her watercolors of the period 1930-1940, eclipses the later work of the artist.
In recent years she returns to the free use of the form inventing the sensurealism, the visceral-concrete art, the porn brut, the organic abstraction. Today she is considered a must to understand the mutations of the representation in the twentieth century and the later work of artists like Cindy Sherman, Kara Walker, Sue Williams, Kiki Smith and Elly Strik. Art galleries and museums only began to be interested in her works in recent years. Most of the works of Carol Rama are in the hands of private collectors. She is in a very precarious economic situation with the consequence she needs to swap her works and many collectors are people in her daily life as the local pharmacist or the tailor. Moreover Carol Rama’s collectors are very faithful and buy not only for admiration, obviously, but also to help her. Only in 2010 was there founded the cultural association “Archivio Carol Rama” whose activity is the development and promotion of the artist, as well as the protection of her image and works.
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