Carol Rama: The Body as Resistance

▲ Dorina (1944) and Dorina (1945), watercolors by Carol Rama, from private collections. Photo courtesy of the Accorsi-Ometto Foundation/Museum of Decorative Art.

▲ The artist portrayed by Bepi Ghiotti. Photo courtesy of the Bepi Ghiotti Archive

▲ I due Pini (Apassionata) , watercolor by Carol Rama. Photo courtesy of the Accorsi-Ometto Foundation/Museum of Decorative Art

Alejandra Ortiz Castañares

Special for La Jornada

La Jornada Newspaper, Monday, August 18, 2025, p. 2

Turin. For years, the artist Carol Rama (1918-2015) was reduced to simplistic comparisons: Louise Bourgeois, Georgia O'Keeffe, or the Italian Frida Kahlo. But her work—visceral, rebellious, deeply rooted in the body and experience—cannot be explained by external similarities. A decade after her death, far from being a side note, she is celebrated as one of the most important Italian artists of the 20th century.

Her consecration came extraordinarily late. In 2003, at the age of 87, she received the Golden Lion for lifetime achievement at the Venice Biennale. She had been painting since the age of 14 and, indignantly, declared: "It infuriates me to receive this award, because if I'm really that good, I don't understand why I had to go hungry for so long."

Carol Rama was a self-taught artist and claimed to have had no master painters and that her guide had been “the sense of sin,” while art critic Lea Vergine considered it to be madness.

A recent study by Carolina Sprovieri (2024) has analyzed the analogy between the now famous French-American sculptor Louise Bourgeois and Rama, to whom several exhibitions have been dedicated in the past. The scholar highlights the attachment to family memories that led them to explore broader universal themes, suggesting, among other aspects, a new way of representing the female body. Unlike the dominant masculine vision, they did not show an idealized body, but rather a transformed one, mixed with objects, open to change and a creation from the feminine. The social invisibility that both suffered left its mark on their art.

A rebel in her own home

The exhibition Carol Rama: Geniale sregolatezza ( Unbridled Genius ), organized by the Accorsi-Ometto Foundation in Turin, northern Italy, her hometown, presents a broad retrospective that covers the key stages of her production from the 1930s to the early 2000s. Curated by Francesco Poli and Luca Motto, the exhibition brings together a chronological and aesthetic narrative with over 100 works from public and private collections.

Throughout her career, Rama explored a remarkable diversity of artistic expressions, from the free-flowing, erotic watercolors of her youth to expressionist compositions with a strong pictorial subject matter. Her experimentation led her through Concrete Art, Informalism, and finally to a unique language in which she assembled industrial materials, medical objects, and domestic fragments on canvas. This Bricolage series would become one of her most recognizable works.

At other stages, Rama explored material abstraction with elements such as inner tubes, and later returned to fantastical and dreamlike figuration on old papers. In his later years, his imagery was fueled by contemporary themes, such as the "mad cow" painting of the 1990s, with which he said he identified: "For me, they are extraordinary self-portraits. I interpreted it erotically with these breasts and these bull penises."

The exhibition includes audiovisual and historical material and is enriched by the photographic series Inside Carol Rama , by Bepi Ghiotti, which documents the artist's home-studio, a vital space for creation and encounter with central figures of Italian culture such as Calvino, Pavese and Sanguineti.

This year, the Frankfurt Kunsthalle and the Bern Kunstmuseum dedicated their first major retrospectives in Germany and Switzerland to him. The Aspen Art Museum in Texas is also showing his work until September 7.

Eroticism and social criticism

From her first known painting, Abuela Carolina (1936), made at age 18, Carol Rama revealed her inner world: an old woman wearing a necklace of leeches, inspired by her childhood, when she collected leeches from a fountain to sell to a pharmacy. As she herself said: “In my work, I always reference something that has moved, disturbed, or fascinated me, something I have had an emotional connection with, whether in my childhood or in the present.”

In the 1940s, in secret and with rudimentary materials, he produced a series of watercolors on his father's account books: mutilated bodies, exposed genitals, false teeth, and snaking tongues. In "Appasionada ," one of his best-known series, he blends eroticism, biography, and social criticism, inspired by visits to the psychiatric hospital where his mother was admitted after suffering a nervous breakdown.

However, the genitals are not the symbolic center of his work, as is often believed, but the mouth, from which tongues of fire emerge, which he used at different stages. “The mouth is what you say and what you love... it's more scandalous because it contains all the eros we bury,” he stated. “I use genitals as still lifes; the mouth, on the other hand, is living desire.”

His first solo exhibition, in 1945, was closed because it was considered obscene. These works weren't publicly exhibited again until 1979, when a collector discovered them by chance in his home.

A race of efforts

Carol Rama moved in the avant-garde circles of Turin, one of the most culturally dynamic cities of her time. There she found support and encouragement, and she found herself in a pivotal position in her life, beginning with the early inspiration of the painter Felice Casorati—a protagonist of magical realism in 1920s Italy—who recognized her intimate and transgressive vision.

Throughout her career, Rama gained recognition thanks to the support of key figures in the artistic and cultural world who appreciated her uniqueness. Among her closest allies was the poet Edoardo Sanguineti, who described her as "anarchic" and coined the term "bricolage" to refer to her works from the 1960s and 1970s: complex compositions with paint and diverse objects such as doll eyes, prosthetics, threads, and tubes, which challenged the limits of the traditional canvas.

The gallery owner Luciano Anselmino, a prominent figure in the spread of surrealism and pop art in Italy, was instrumental in Rama's international reach. He discovered Rama and took her to key venues such as Paris, Rome, and New York, until his death in 1979, which cut short that momentum.

From the 1980s onwards, it was the critic Lea Vergine who catalysed Rama's reappraisal. Drawing on her interest in the body as the focus of contemporary art, she saw a radical voice in Rama and included her in the influential exhibition L' altra met à dell ' avanguardia (Milan, 1980), before later organising her first major retrospective in 1985. From then on, Rama began to be recognised within a critical genealogy that addressed themes such as sexuality, pain, madness and female identity.

The first international retrospective was at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam; it then traveled to Boston. But the turning point came in 2014 with The Passion According to Carol Rama at MACBA in Barcelona—the most ambitious to date, with more than 200 works—which toured for three years, until 2017, to Paris, Helsinki, Dublin, and Turin.

The exhibition provided a critical reinterpretation that not only gave her visibility but also allowed her to dismantle established narratives—both hegemonic and feminist—by highlighting how Rama constructed, over seven decades, a key grammar for understanding the mutations in the representation of the body and sexuality, pointing to her as a precursor to artists such as Cindy Sherman, Kara Walker, and Kiki Smith.

Rama and the market

After her death in 2016, two iconic works by Carol Rama fetched prices that, in some cases, exceeded their estimates by more than 700 percent. At Christie's, Presagio di Birnam (1994) sold for €218,000. Meanwhile, Sotheby's London sold Arcadia (Ti amo ... Ti amo) (1975) in March 2017 for €272,712, against an estimate of between €84,000 and €120,000. These results not only broke the artist's previous records, but also sealed her definitive entry into the international market, no longer as a cult figure, as she had been until then, but as a historic voice whose work—radical, free, unclassifiable—continues to disturb and engage in dialogue with contemporary art.

▲ In 2016, a year after Carol Rama's death, her apartment was converted into a museum thanks to the Fondazione Sardi per l'Arte, which acquired the furniture and objects for preservation. Photo courtesy of Nick Ash

Alejandra Ortiz Castañares

La Jornada Newspaper, Monday, August 18, 2025, p. 3

Turin. Carol Rama's studio-house allows the public to enter her universe. The space is much more than an artist's home; it was her "refuge," the very "laboratory" where the ideas for her paintings were conceived and where the materials she used to create them are preserved. It is considered an additional work by the artist, who ironically "signed" it on the entrance doorbell.

In 2016, a year after the artist's death, the apartment was designated by the Superintendency as an artist's studio, and in 2019 it became a museum thanks to the Fondazione Sardi per l'Arte, which acquired the furniture and objects for preservation and loan to the Carol Rama Archive. The latter was also assigned to create its catalogue raisonné (Skira, 2023).

It is located in the center of Turin at 15 Via Napione, on the fourth and top floor of an Art Deco building. This is where she carried out virtually all of her work. She considered it "a premeditated house" with "poor" objects, albeit loaded with memories that contained their own life. The artifacts invade the entire house, not chaotically, but with an order that I could describe as installations similar to "still lifes." A space that for her was like a set where she filmed her own existential film, which transmits a timeless and magnetic quality to the visitor, and a great curiosity to discover the objects that adorn the house.

Like her work, it changed over time, until it took on its current appearance in the late 1980s, when the artist completely darkened it by covering the windows with black curtains, the purpose of which was to immerse her in her own world and avoid distractions from outside, reinforced by the also dark wooden walls and floor.

“Shelter of the soul”

She herself dressed entirely in black and considered it her favorite color, along with red. In an interview, she stated that it would be the color that would help her die. She also loved gray, and regarding brown, she said it reflected "the negative memories that I almost always have in my life." Here, one discovers the raw material for both her paintings and her affections. Her home was, for her, a "refuge for the soul," a storehouse of memories, and a hotbed of ideas.

The entrance fee is 40 euros per person. It can be visited twice a week and two Saturdays a month. For information and reservations, visit casamuseocarolrama.it.