Carol Rama

Carol Rama has followed a very independent path since the beginning of her artistic career Turin in the 1930s. Carol Rama quickly established herself on the art scene and was invited as early as 1948 and 1950 to take part in the Venice Biennale. This institution recently acknowledged her contribution to the visual arts with a lifetime achievement award in 2003.

Apart from a decade in the 1950s when her work led towards a pure abstraction, Carol Rama always maintained an interest in the human body, its mutations, its sexuality, its amputations, infused with a sensibility that led more towards a contemporary view of Humanity than to Surrealism. Therefore, her images are always extremely harsh and pervaded by a sardonic, cynical anger.

The main movements that influenced her work – a mixture of Dadaism and Surrealism, and in particular artists like Marcel Duchamp, Man Ray and Hans Bellmer – are profoundly amalgamated within her own aesthetic and her own biographical experience.

The current work belongs to a series begun in the 1960s called Bricolage. These compositions include glass eyes or teeth, nails, animal claws laid down on paper or canvas and then painted with blotches of painting or organic material.