Page 62 - 50.La Biennale di Venezia issue of World of Art Magazine

BIENNALE VENEZIA

50TH INTERNATIONAL ART EXHIBITION 2003

Dreams and Conflicts - The Dictatorship of the Viewer

Carol Rama, Torino 1997 Carol Rama, Torino 1998
(photo Pino Dell’Aquila) (photo Roberto Goffi)

CAROL RAMA
Leone d’oro for Lifetime Achievement

the death of her husband, Rama’s mother worked as a furrier) or in
her aunt’s workshop in Leghorn, which produced wooden legs for
wounded soldiers and civilians.
References to her personal experience are constant and almost
Carol Rama obsessive, but also cryptic and subtly ironic.
In this regard, her 1936 watercolour, depicting her grand-mother,
Nonna Carolina, is extremely significant: around the old woman’s
neck are dozens of black leeches - used at the time in medicine - with
Leone d’oro for Lifetime Achievement
artificial limbs flying around her.
Olga Carolina Rama, who works under the name of Carol Rama or
Striking but sweetened with a touch of joyous irony is a 1941 work
Carolrama, was born in Turin on 17 April 1918. She began painting
entitled Appassionata. This is a watercolour on paper in which we
in the early 1930s, not following studies at the Reale Accademia
see a girl lying on a hospital bed with a metal frame; both her arms
Albertina delle Belle Arti of Turin, but by assiduously frequenting Felice
and legs have been amputated and there are two incongruous little
Casorati (1883-1963), at the time the most noted and influential artist
red shoes at the foot of the bed. There are many other similar works,
in Turin, whose studio formed a stimulating artistic and cultural ‘club’.
all bearing the identical tide - Appassionata -which, indeed, we may
Between 1937 and 1945, Carol Rama painted some self-portraits
consider to constitute a fully-fledged pictorial cycle.
and numerous portraits of friends, in which the vivid colours of the
In all these works there is, without doubt, the expressionist influence
garments are laid in flat tones and in some cases the physiognomy
of Egon Schiele and the Dadaist influence of Marcel Duchamp, Man
is simplified to the point of reducing the face’s features to patches of
Ray and Hans Bellmer with the difference, however, that in Carol Rama
lumpy colour (Green self-portrait; 1944).
prevails an interest for the body, its amputations, mutations and a
In the first half of the 1940s, Carol Rama also produced small
sexuality of a precociously feminist “genre”. In the extreme hardness
watercolours on paper with artificial arms and legs as their subject
and sardonic anger shown in the choice of iconography and pictorial
(Teatrino n. 3, 1938), as well as false teeth, urinals (Pissoir 1941),
style, it exceeds any simple ‘quotation’ of Dadaist or surrealist forms,
lavatory brushes, shaving brushes, women’s shoes and fox collars.
and anticipates by 40 years today’s trends such as the Postorganic
These are all objets trouvés seen by Carol Rama at home (after
and Post Human.
62 WORLD of ART