On the occasion of the tenth anniversary of her passing, the Accorsi-Ometto Foundation pays tribute, through a wide retrospective, to Carol Rama (1918-2015), the great Turin artist of international fame, awarded with the Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement at the 2003 Venice Biennale.

The exhibition, curated by Francesco Poli and Luca Motto, presents a careful selection of about a hundred works from important public and private collections, documenting the main stages of the artist's research from the thirties to the early 2000s.

 THE EXHIBITION PATH

The exhibition, which is divided into different sections, opens with a series of watercolors from the late thirties, characterized by the expressive freedom of the graphic sign and an explicit erotic charge, in which the artist pours out the fantasies and anxieties of her adolescence, depicting allusive and emblematic characters and objects drawn from her own experiences. Alongside this are the parallel expressionist productions of the forties, with oils characterized by a dense pictorial material and drawings depicting faces, figures, and landscapes.

The next section frames Carol Rama's research in the early fifties, which, in line with the new post-war pictorial languages, approaches concrete abstract art. In 1953, she joined, along with Paola Levi Montalcini, as the only woman, the Turin group of Concrete Art Movement (Biglione, Galvano, Parisot, Scroppo).

At the end of the decade, Carol Rama, like most artists of her generation, turned to Informal art: the exhibition displays a series of paintings characterized by a thick pictorial material where a powerful chromatic and signic charge emerges.

Then, the well-known series of Bricolage (as defined by Edoardo Sanguineti) produced from the mid-sixties is presented: the informal stain painting approach is integrated with the collage of objects such as doll eyes, metal scraps, syringes, stones, rubber stoppers, and much more - recovered materials and objects, laden with experiences, that become part of the painting composition. There are also works from the late sixties composed of enamels, sprayed varnishes, and object insertions that, through allusions to figures with prosthetic limbs and atomic shadows, refer to the human condition during the Cold War era.

The next section of the exhibition considers the production of the seventies, where the artist, with the series of the so-called Gomme (Eraser), distances herself from her previous production and proposes works with a completely renewed imprint. The basic pictorialism is abolished in favor of the experience of the painting itself, reduced to its minimal terms: on monochrome white or black surfaces, Carol Rama arranges portions of inner tubes, sometimes pendulous, in balanced abstract compositions, animated only by chromatic differences and traces of use.

This is followed by a return to a renewed figuration, typical of the eighties and nineties, with a complex and refined technique, chromatically vibrant: worlds populated by human figures, angels, animals, geometries, landscapes, and fantastic perspectives on pre-printed papers, often from the previous century.

The exhibition concludes with the most recent production between the nineties and the early 2000s: human figures, faces, animals, and anatomical parts populate, even during this period, the artist's intricate allusive language. In particular, starting from the mid-nineties, Carol Rama develops another theme that would become a constant until the 2000s: after seeing on television images related to the so-called "mad cow disease," she creates a new series of impactful works based on them.

Through photographs and interview footage, the audience will be able to further deepen their knowledge of the artist's extraordinary personality.