ART PRESENTATION: Carol Rama-Antibodies

00Ignored for decades by official art history, Carol Rama is now recognised as essential for understanding developments within contemporary art.Born in 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.

ByEfi Michalarou
Photo: New Museum Archive

“Antibodies” is the title of the first New York Museum survey of Carol Rama’s  work and the largest presentation of her work in the U.S.A. to date. The exhibition brings together 150 of her paintings, objects, and works on paper, highlighting her consistent fascination with the representation of the body. Encompassing her entire career, the exhibition traces the development from her early erotic, depictions of “bodies without organs” through later works that invoke innards, fluids, and limbs, a miniature theater of cruelty in which metaphors of contagion and madness counteract every accepted norm. Rama was born in Turin 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”. As a young unmarried woman in fascist Italy, at 21 years of age, Rama was already creating images that were challenging state censorship. Between 1937 and 1945 she often painted portraits, both of friends and self, with simplified flattened depictions. Her first exhibition in 1945 at Galleria Faber 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, with traces of the body found in her unconventional materials. Her early works were watercolour paintings and beginning in the ‘50s she began incorporating objects such as hypodermic syringes and small mechanical parts into her work and she joined with other abstract artists in the Movimento Arte Concreta Torinese, although always maintaining her individual style. In the ‘60s, her primary material became strips of rubber from tires. In her series “Vulnerable Organisms” from the ’70s Rama dissects the inner tube of the bicycle tire, a product of her father’s factory, lying flat like a skin upon the canvas. She scars its surface or folds it like labia, making them as dark and furtive as her other abstractions. 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. Seen together, the works present a rare opportunity to examine the ways in which Rama’s fantastical anatomies opposed the political ideology of her time and continue to speak to ideas of desire, sacrifice, repression, and liberation.

Info: Helga Christoffersen and Massimiliano Gioni, New Museum, 235 Bowery, New York, Duration: 26/4-10/9/17, Days & Hours: Tue-Wed & Fri-Sun 11:00-18:00, Thu 11:00-21:00, www.newmuseum.org

Carol Rama, Seduzioni, 1984, Mixed mediums on printed paper, 34 x 48 cm, © Archivio Carol Rama-Turin, Photo: Pino dell’Aquila, New Museum Archive
Carol Rama, Seduzioni, 1984, Mixed mediums on printed paper, 34 x 48 cm, © Archivio Carol Rama-Turin, Photo: Pino dell’Aquila, New Museum Archive

 

 

Carol Rama, Spazio anche più che tempo, 1970 , Rubber tire collage on canvas, 120 x 150 cm, © Archivio Carol Rama-Turin, Photo: Pino dell’Aquila, New Museum Archive
Carol Rama, Spazio anche più che tempo, 1970 , Rubber tire collage on canvas, 120 x 150 cm, © Archivio Carol Rama-Turin, Photo: Pino dell’Aquila, New Museum Archive

 

 

Carol Rama, L’isola degli ochhi, 1967, Plastic eyes, synthetic resin, and enamel on canvas, 120 x 160 cm, © Archivio Carol Rama-Turin, Photo: Gabriele Gaidano, New Museum Archive
Carol Rama, L’isola degli ochhi, 1967, Plastic eyes, synthetic resin, and enamel on canvas, 120 x 160 cm, © Archivio Carol Rama-Turin, Photo: Gabriele Gaidano, New Museum Archive

 

 

Carol Rama, Spazio anche più che tempo, 1970, Rubber tire collage on canvas, 110 x 120 cm, © Archivio Carol Rama-Turin, Courtesy Isabella Bortolozzi Galerie-Berlin, Photo: Nick Ash, New Museum Archive
Carol Rama, Spazio anche più che tempo, 1970, Rubber tire collage on canvas, 110 x 120 cm, © Archivio Carol Rama-Turin, Courtesy Isabella Bortolozzi Galerie-Berlin, Photo: Nick Ash, New Museum Archive

 

 

Left: Carol Rama, Le tagliole, 1966, Hide and enamel on canvas, 60 x 50 cm, Photo: Tommaso Mattina, New Museum Archive. Right: Carol Rama, Sortilegi, 1984, Composition with found objects and rubber, 159 x 112.5 x 68.7 cm, Photo: Stefan Altenburger Photography-Zurich, New Museum Archive
Left: Carol Rama, Le tagliole, 1966, Hide and enamel on canvas, 60 x 50 cm, Photo: Tommaso Mattina, New Museum Archive. Right: Carol Rama, Sortilegi, 1984, Composition with found objects and rubber, 159 x 112.5 x 68.7 cm, Photo: Stefan Altenburger Photography-Zurich, New Museum Archive

 

 

Carol Rama, Pissoirs, 2005, Mixed mediums on printed paper, 96 x 108.6 cm, © Archivio Carol Rama-Turin, Courtesy Isabella Bortolozzi Galerie-Berlin, Photo: Nick Ash, New Museum Archive
Carol Rama, Pissoirs, 2005, Mixed mediums on printed paper, 96 x 108.6 cm, © Archivio Carol Rama-Turin, Courtesy Isabella Bortolozzi Galerie-Berlin, Photo: Nick Ash, New Museum Archive