ART-PRESENTATION: Carol Rama-Eye of Eyes
Ignored for decades by official art history, Carol Rama is now recognised as essential for understanding developments within contemporary art. Born in 17/4/1918 in Turin, Carol Rama was never academically trained or faithful to individual art movements, she developed a body of work over 70 years that is as unique as it is obsessive, Rama experimented with alternative materials, developing techniques for inventing new spaces of desire and her work challenges the dominant narratives around sexuality, madness, animalism, life and death.
By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: Lévy Gorvy Gallery Archive
The exhibition “Eye of Eyes” expands and enriches narratives attending the work of the Italian Avant-Garde artist Carol Rama. Siting her work in the context of the exhibitions she visited, the artists she was in conversation with, and the formal and conceptual concerns she encountered in the efforts of her contemporaries, the exhibition makes vivid the artistic landscape Rama occupied. Carol Rama, like Louise Bourgeois and Yayoi Kusama, endured painful family psychodrama, when she was 15, her mother was admitted to a psychiatric clinic. Her father went bankrupt and committed suicide. Painting was an escape from her anguish and became a world in which she could exercise her extreme need for freedom: “I didn’t have any painters as masters, the sense of sin is my master”. Rama’s work is animated by raw, maverick energy. Alternately described as “sensurrealism,” “organic abstraction” and “porn brut” it moves between inspiration and madness, exulting in states of abjection and obsession. Inextricable from her womanhood, Rama’s oeuvre stands out in a male-dominated art world for its frank exploration of feminine and queer desires. Although counting such artists and writers as Felice Casorati, Pablo Picasso, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Italo Calvino, and Carlo Mollino as friends, she maintained a resolute autonomy, surpassing available critical vocabularies that sought to contain her idiosyncratic vision. Among the works on view is a selection of Rama’s early figurative watercolors, including “Opera n. 18” (1939) and “Appassionata” (1941). Arriving from a raw, youthful perspective, this series of unabashedly sexual images was censored in the artist’s first solo exhibition, at Galleria Faber in 1945 at was shut down by Mussolini’s fascist regime. After the extreme reaction to this representational work, Rama changed her name and consciously moved into abstraction. Also featured is a sequence of the artist’s “Bricolage” works dating from 1964 to 1968. Rama began this series of assemblages on canvas, titled by her lifelong friend, the poet Edoardo Sanguineti, in the 1960s, following her brief engagement with the Milan and Turin-based Movimento Arte Concreta* (Concrete Art Movement). The densely arranged compositions feature such unusual and specific objects as taxidermy and doll eyes, surgical tools, fur, and rifle cartridges. The densely arranged compositions feature such unusual and specific objects as taxidermy and doll eyes, surgical tools, fur, and rifle cartridges. The rubber inner tubes that recur in a related series of abstract, Minimalist works composed throughout the ’70s refer to the artist’s father, who owned a factory that manufactured bicycle and automobile parts. When the artist was 24, her father’s business went bankrupt, plunging her family into poverty and driving her father to commit suicide. The inner tubes and tires, typically cut and flattened by the artist, might resemble flaccid phalluses, or aged skin that has been composed in the language of geometric abstraction. Resolutely autonomous for the entirety of her life, Rama never married nor lived with any romantic partners. Likewise, she refused to be relegated to the position of muse or disciple of the established male artists with whom she was often seen and photographed. When Rama was 62, the censored works she had made in her 20s was finally shown, bringing her new recognition but not for the new work she was making at that time. In 2003, Rama received the Golden Lion award at the Venice Biennale, 11 years later.
* First coined by the Dutch artist and designer Theo Van Doesburg (1883-1931), the term “Concrete Art” refers to any type of Abstract Art which has no figurative or symbolic references. Thus, an abstract painting whose motifs or shapes are evidently derived from any natural elements, would not be considered concrete art: the picture must be wholly devoid of any naturalistic associations. As a result, most Concrete Art is based on geometric imagery and patterns.
Info: Curators: Flavia Frigeri and Valentina Castellani, Lévy Gorvy Gallery, 909 Madison Avenue, New York, Duration: 24/1-23/3/19, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 10:00-18:00, www.levygorvy.com
