Rome, Alda Fendi Foundation exhibits a masterpiece by Carol Rama, Appassionata

A masterpiece by Carol Rama (Turin, Italy, 1918 - 2015) on display for the first time. The Alda Fendi Foundation-Experiments is in fact exhibiting Appassionata, an important work by Carol Rama from 1980, which is being shown to the public in Rome at Palazzo Rhinoceros, the cultural hub conceived by Alda Fendi and designed by Jean Nouvel with the artistic line of Raffaele Curi. It will run from Tuesday, Dec. 12, 2023 through Jan. 20, 2024, with free admission, as always for the Foundation’s initiatives.

With Carol Rama’s Appassionata, the Rhinoceros exhibition formula is revived, presenting the public with a masterpiece never before seen in the Eternal City. The spotlight is now on Carol Rama’s work, which comes from a private collection. Also, on the occasion of the exhibition opening, on Tuesday, December 12, 2023 at 5:30 p.m. Rhinoceros will host the presentation of the volume Carol Rama. Catalog raisonné 1936-2005, commissioned by the Carol Rama Archive and supported by Fondazione Sardi per l’Arte. The result of scientific research begun in 2014 and published in two tomes by Skira editore, the catalog fully analyzes seven decades of the artist’s work, from 1936 to 2005, in all their complexity and particularity. Presenting it are the volume’s editors, Maria Cristina Mundici, Raffaella Roddolo and Maria Grazia Messina, together with Alda Fendi and Raffaele Curi, who was a friend of Carol Rama’s in her younger years.

The exhibition

In Raffaele Curi’s installation idea, which outlines the exhibition, Carol Rama’s poetics meet that of Jean Nouvel, the archistar designer of Rhinoceros Palace. Equal and opposite, the two figures share a sense of poverty, suffering and a seduction for precariousness, which is expressed by the metaphor of the hospital bed. Raffaele Curi’s project aims to evoke the blackness of the artist’s house overlooking the dormer windows of Turin. To recreate its atmosphere, one of the apartments designed by Jean Nouvel inside Rhinoceros, normally not open to the public, is chosen as an exhibition container. In here, the semi-darkness is pierced by a spotlight shining on Carol Rama’s painting Appassionata . Another light illuminates a moving metronome, placed just below the painting, to recall the metronome given to her by Man Ray, which is still preserved in his house museum. If the visitor wants to discover the work’s caption, he or she must enlist the help of a flashlight.

Passionate is also the title of the Piano Sonata No. 23 by Beethoven, a composer of whom Carol Rama was a great admirer, which saturates the air as a soundtrack, emphasizing the beauty of the painting. The vicissitudes of art are intertwined with personal lives and memories: in his tribute to the artist, with whom he was an associate and frequent visitor in his youth through the legendary Turin gallery owner Luciano Anselmino, Raffaele Curi wants to recall the occasions when he would sleep over at Carol’s house and, to thank her, give her records of classical music.

A central, and singular, figure in Italian art history, Carol Rama traversed the twentieth century under the banner of experimentalism in subjects and materials. Awarded the Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement at the 50th Venice Biennale in 2003, by the 2000s she began to be appreciated beyond national borders. Her fame grows further after 2015 also thanks to major retrospectives in Europe and the United States. In short, she becomes an icon of creativity for artists of recent generations.

Rome, Alda Fendi Foundation exhibits a masterpiece by Carol Rama, Appassionata

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