Loss, trauma and sexuality: seven decades of the work of Carol Rama

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Little known for most of her long career, Carol Rama is now finding her work celebrated around Europe

A significant part of Carol Rama’s work mirrors the personal tragedies she experienced when she was young: her mother’s admission to a psychiatric clinic and her father’s suicide after the bankruptcy of his bicycle factory. Her work features objects associated with her family, friends and fantasies, from the false teeth and shoes of her grandmother, to the prosthetic limbs made by her uncle Edoardo for wounded soldiers.

A self-taught artist, Rama (b.1918) began painting watercolours as a form of therapy and as an escape from her fears and anguish. Her recent show at Nottingham Contemporary, featuring over 50 works, spanned an artistic career through seven decades and presented watercolours, drawings, paintings, print and sculpture. It concentrated on four phases of Rama’s practice: early erotic watercolours, experimentation with geometric abstract painting: her first collage-paintings; and ending with her most recent re-engagement with erotic figuration.

Rama’s early watercolours depict delicate and often shockingly provocative erotic images. In these works Rama features characters related to her visits to the psychiatric clinic. For example, in the 1941 Opera n. 54 (‘Opus No 54’) she portrays an abstract naked woman with a thick red tongue sticking out of her mouth. In most of these images, Rama employs the same approach to representing the half-naked patients she used to see during her visits: nude figures with wreaths on their heads and their tongue sticking out of their mouths, men with multiple penises or women with snakes in their vaginas. Interestingly, Rama repeated the tongue as a theme in her recent work. In her 2002 work Lusinghe (‘Allurements’), she depicts 12 drawings of the same woman’s face, all with the tongue sticking out. Rama explains that the sticking-out tongue is ‘the object of desire’, a desire everyone has but ‘etiquette enables us to swallow our tongues’.

The innovative nature of Rama’s work is also apparent in her large-scale abstract artworks, composed of a range of unusual material, such as dolls’ eyes, animals’ claws and the inner tubes of bicycle tyres. The use of bicycle tyres is a response to her father’s factory, which had to close, leading to his suicide. The repeated employment of the bicycle inner tubes, sliced open and flattened out to hang away from the painting, in works such as the 1970 Organismi Ancora ben Difitini e Vulnerabili (‘Still Well-defined and Vulnerable Organisms’) and the 1977 Movemento e Immobilita di Birnam (‘Movement and Stillness di Birnam’) represent Rama’s emotional association with the material and a complicated metaphor with which Rama relates power to her father: as Rama confessed, ‘tyres have given me much joy. Tyres remind me of my father, the factory, they remind me of power’.

Rama’s work is charged with her personal experience of loss, trauma and sexuality. Despite the great interconnection in her work with autobiographical elements, Rama is equally concerned with socio-political events. For example, the creation of the atomic bomb and the outbreak of mad cow disease in the UK a few years ago. In her 1967 work Senza Titolo (‘Untitled’), Rama outlines an image of the atomic bomb on paper and adds some dolls’ eyes. Rama explains that:

these images were like burned, tortured people, always with a problem of body and Eros, with a poor material, black or coloured spray, and with the eyes glued on which came from some taxidermists in Milan. I always needed to create a mutilation. Maybe it was a mutilation at the event of war but also on me.

Though Rama’s work was relatively unknown (until art curator and critic Lea Vergine included her in the 1980 exhibition ‘The Other Half of the Avant-Garde’), she became actively involved with artists and writers from an early age. Her lifelong artistic relationship with Italian writer Edoardo Sanguineti resulted in an exchange of artistic ideas and expressions. The 1960 canvas Riso Nero (‘Black Rice’) represents a significant shift in Rama’s approach to painting. This was the first artwork in which Rama began applying materials found or everyday objects (in this case rice) not associated with art. Rama’s unusual application was referred to as ‘Bricolage’ by Sanguineti, a term borrowed from French philosopher Claude Levi-Strauss.  

Carol Rama is now 96 and still lives and works in the same flat in Turin. A major exhibition of her work opens at the end of this month in Barcelona, Spain.