Carol Rama, "Appassionata", 1939
Courtesy Galleria Franco Masoero, Turin. Foto: Pino Dell'Aquila

Carol Rama, "Appassionata", 1939
Privatsammlung, Mailand. Foto: Giovanni Ricci

Opening
Friday, December 3, 2004, 7 p.m.

Opening adress by Dr. Elisabeth Zanon, head of the Tyrolean government’s office for cultural affairs
Introduction to the exhibition by Dr. Silvia Eiblmayr, director of Galerie im Taxispalais
Saluto by Dr. Giovanni Pedrazzoli, General Consul of Italy

In her early work (from 1936 on) Carol Rama assumed a radical taboo breaking position. She anticipated a number of things that were typical of the artistic preoccupation with the body and sexuality in the 1960s and 1970s. In her fragile water-colors she painted and drew erotic scenes replete with often fragmented, injured bodies of mainly women, or objects charged with sexual symbolism such as shoes, prostheses or even animals. In the 1950s she turned to abstraction only to then add body-specific materials to these paintings as well, such as animal claws, fur, doll eyes or tiny rubber tubes.

Since the early 1980s Carol Rama has once again taken up her early theme, namely, the erotic drawing, which incorporates both everyday subject-matter and mythical figures that – as in almost her entire oeuvre – also show an ironic character.

Carol Rama occupies a unique position among the artists of her generation. She was born in 1918 in Turin and grew up as the youngest daughter of a Turin factory owner. As an artist Carol Rama is self-taught. Felice Casorati, however – at the time the most famous painter in Turin – gave her recognition and encouragement. Carol Rama points to the family pressures to which she was exposed as a young girl as an important impulse for her own artistic work. In 1988 she said: „... I discovered that painting freed me from the anguish I felt at what was happening to my family, transforming it into anguish at everything that society loosely indicated as transgression. I can’t deny that I was very fond of this game and took it to extremes.“

Carol Rama found an expression for what the poet Eduardo Sanguineti described as follows: “I like to suppose, rather, that Carol represents egregiously the case of the artist who feels a shiver of frightened amazement at the first materialization of her own deepest imaginings, and strives for a long time, in arduous exorcism, to cool them, to circumvent them, to project them neutralized in a chain of solutions which are equivalent, but rendered controllable and bearable, and I think we may also say painless, by astute tempering and skillful screening, through techniques of abstract objectification, preserving the original tension, but dissimulating it and displacing it just enough to make it tolerable and breathable, not in other’s eyes but in her own eyes.” (from: “L'esilio e il ritorno”)

The exhibition "Carol Rama. Appassionata" offers an exemplary overview of the complete works of the artist, focusing in particular on her significant close artistic relationship with Edoardo Sanguineti. On January 10, 2005, 7 p.m., Edoardo Sanguineti is scheduled to read from his own texts at the Galerie im Taxispalais, many of which deal with Carol Rama.

"Carol Rama. Appassionata" presents the artist for the first time to the German-speaking world with a comprehensive exhibition. Until recently, Carol Rama’s works have only been displayed in small numbers outside of Italy. The Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam staged the first full-scale exhibition of the artist’s work in 1998; the year before that, her work was shown in the US at Esso Gallery, New York, for the first time.

In the summer of 2003 Carol Rama was awarded the Golden Lion of the Biennale in Venice.
She lives in Turin.

The exhibition "Carol Rama. Appassionata" has been organized in cooperation with Dr. Brigitte Reinhardt, director of the Ulmer Museum, Ulm, where it was shown from September 12 to November 14, 2004, and Franco Masoero and Alexandra Wetzel, Gallery Franco Masoero, Turin.

Talk
with Carol Rama, Dr. Brigitte Reinhardt, Director of the Ulmer Museum, Ulm,
Franco Masoero and Alexandra Wetzel, Gallery Franco Masoero, Turin
Saturday, December 4, 2004, 12 noon

Reading
Edoardo Sanguineti
Monday, January 10, 2005, 7 p.m. 

In cooperation with the Italian Cultural Institute, Innsbruck

Thanks to 
Franco Masoero and Alexandra Wetzel, Gallery Franco Masoero, Turin, to all lenders and to the Italian Cultural Institute, Innsbruck.