Carol Rama

Acquired directly from the artist by the family of the present owner circa 1970s

Colour: The colour in the catalogue illustration is fairly accurate. Condition: Please refer to the department for a professional condition report.
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Executed in the early 1970s and comprising the artist’s archetypal use of bicycle inner tubes, Untitled is quintessential Rama: in its formal economy it chimes with Minimalism and the materiality of Arte Povera. Beginning in the 1930s in Fascist Italy and ending with her death at the age of 97, it is only now in the Twenty-First Century that the full remit of her pioneering recapitulation of gender, corporeality, sexuality, and desire is beginning to be understood. Notably, Rama’s seminal contribution to the post-war avant-garde has recently been celebrated in the first New York survey of her work entitled Carol Rama: Antibodies at the New Museum in New York from April to October 2017.

As readily attested to by the present work, during the late 1960s and early 1970s, Rama’s paintings were increasingly characterised by her decisive use of ready-made materials, and in particular bicycle inner tubes. Her increasingly sculptural work was consonant with the visual economy of the Italian Arte Povera. Writer and curator Beatriz Preciado has contended: “The elaboration of organic forms, the use of primary matter or industrial materials, the attention to the relation between art and subjectivity, the privileging of popular and traditional craft forms… All of these resources that are the characteristic operators of povera are present in the work of Carol Rama”; and yet, Preciado continues, Rama’s work is more “visceral and dirty than poor” (Beatriz Preciado, ‘The Phantom Limb. Carol Rama and the History of Art’, in: ibid., p. 19). Notably, for Rama, whose father ran a bicycle factory and tragically committed suicide after falling into bankruptcy, this material choice acts as both a tribute to, and a symptom of, lasting familial trauma. Indeed, akin to many twentieth-century female artists whose biographical narratives have been somewhat over-determined (such as Louise Bourgeois and Yayoi Kusama), much has been made of Rama’s psychobiography. To reduce her practice to that of the hysterical neurotic and self-taught outsider, however, is to grossly overlook the innovation and pioneering magnitude of Rama’s career, which is now only beginning to gain the acclaim and recognition it so pointedly deserves.

Rama’s practice utterly defies categorisation. Traversing Surrealism, Abstract Expressionism, Minimalism and Pop hers is an oeuvre that stands outside of the Twentieth Century’s canonical artistic movements. Her first known pieces are sexually explicit works on paper from the thirties and forties depicting provocatively unclothed women. It was censorship of these drawings by the Italian Fascist government following her debut exhibition at Faber gallery in Turin in 1945 that forced Rama to turn towards a language of abstract formalism. She thereafter became involved in the Turin-based Concrete Art Movement as means to “provide a certain order” and “limit the excesses of freedom” that was so explicit within her figurative work (Carol Rama cited in: Beatriz Preciado, ‘The Phantom Limb. Carol Rama and the History of Art’, in: Exh. Cat., Barcelona, Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona (and travelling), The Passion According to Carol Rama, 2014-17, p. 14). The bodily drives so readily overt in her earliest watercolours thus found transposition in the new materials and techniques that were experimented with and integrated into her practice. With the onset of the 1960s, Rama developed a corpus of relief-paintings – or Bricolages – that channelled a proclivity for the bodily and the abject. Compositionally, these pieces echo the formlessness of Fontana and Fautrier, and can be considered part of the inward-looking collective impulses of an artistic generation responding to the experience of something culturally unbearable: the Second World War. Rama was thus certainly attuned to developments in the European avant-garde.

As poignantly summarised by Anne Dresse: “Expressionist, Surrealist, Pop, Minimalist: Rama is all those things, and sometimes even appears anachronistic, knowingly outside the big identified movements and, for that very reason, eternally contemporary” (Anne Dresse, ‘Foreign Bodies’ in: Exh. Cat., Barcelona, Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona (and travelling), The Passion According to Carol Rama, 2014-17, p. 36).