Carol Rama: brilliant unruliness, the retrospective in Turin

On the occasion of the 10th anniversary of her death, the Accorsi-Ometto Foundation in Turin pays tribute to Carol Rama (Turin, 1918 - 2015), one of the greatest Italian artists of the 20th century. The exhibition, entitled Carol Rama. Genius Unruliness, will be on view from April 15 to Sept. 14, 2025, and will offer a rare opportunity to explore the expressive and revolutionary universe of the Turin-based artist, whose career marked the history of contemporary art.

Carol Rama, internationally known and awarded the Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement at the Venice Biennale in 2003, was a central figure in the Italian art scene of the 20th century. Her research was characterized by a bold and innovative approach, in which unruliness and freedom of expression found their highest realization. The retrospective, curated by Francesco Poli and Luca Motto, presents about a hundred works from public and private collections, tracing the artist’s evolution from the 1930s to the early 2000s. The selection includes paintings, drawings, collages and salvaged materials that document Carol Rama’s creative process, always poised between provocation and experimentation.

An articulated exhibition itinerary

The exhibition is divided into eight thematic sections that trace the different moments of Carol Rama’s career, offering the public a comprehensive experience of her work. The first section presents a series of watercolors made in the late 1930s, in which the artist explores the fantasies and anxieties of her adolescence, bringing to life characters and objects imbued with explicit eroticism and an immediate expressive charge. These early works are marked by a powerful graphic freedom and a disturbing symbolic charge that anticipates many of the central themes of his later production. In the 1940s, Carol Rama’s research moved toward an expressionist language, with oils characterized by dense pictorial matter and drawings depicting faces, figures and landscapes imbued with emotionality. In the mid-1950s, the artist began to approach concrete abstractionism, joining the Movimento Arte Concreta in Turin. The exhibition presents some of the most important works of the period, where the pictorial material and the graphic sign intertwine in abstract compositions of great visual force.

Toward the end of the 1950s, like many artists of her generation, Carol Rama approached the language of the Informal. On display are paintings that emphasize an overbearing chromatic and sign-like charge, a characteristic that would remain constant in her research in later years. The production of the 1960s, with the famous Bricolages, represents one of the artist’s most innovative and original moments. These works, which mix painting and collage, use salvaged objects, such as doll’s eyes, metals, syringes and rubber caps, integrating them into the pictorial compositions. The materials carry a memory and history that are intertwined with the intensity of the visual experience. The 1970s marked a further renewal in Carol Rama’s artistic language, which broke away from earlier productions and abandoned pictorialism in favor of more minimalist compositions. The Rubbers, made on black or white monochrome surfaces, are works that reduce the painting to its bare minimum, with the use of inner tubes arranged in elegant abstract compositions. This approach marks a reflection on matter and its interaction with space, in a kind of meditation on form and absence.

Renewed figuration and the anxieties of the 1990s

The return to figuration in the 1980s and 1990s marks a phase of great intensity and technical sophistication. Carol Rama paints worlds populated by human figures, angels, animals and geometry, on pre-printed papers that add an extra layer of complexity to her works. During this period, her painting explores new chromatic and compositional possibilities, with an extraordinary richness of detail and a continuous tension between the figurative and the abstract. Carol Rama’s latest works, made between the 1990s and early 2000s, continue to develop the themes and suggestions of her research, with human figures, faces, animals and anatomical parts surfacing from the canvases. A series of works made after the television viewing of images related to mad cow disease is characterized by its strong visual impact and reflection on the human condition in a context marked by fear and the dissemination of sensationalist information.

In addition to the retrospective, the public will have the opportunity to explore Bepi Ghiotti’s photographic project Inside Carol Rama, which offers an exclusive look at the artist’s home-studio in Turin. The twelve photographs, taken between 2012 and 2014, reveal the artist’s intimate world, populated with furniture, objects and images that accompanied her life and artistic production. The house on Via Napione was a place of refuge and creation, but also a center of cultural exchange, where Carol Rama met figures such as Italo Calvino, Cesare Pavese, Edoardo Sanguineti, Luciano Berio, and many others.

Notes on the artist

Carol Rama was born in Turin on April 17, 1918. Self-taught, she developed a strong passion for drawing and painting from a young age. Her first work dates from 1936 and, until 1946, she produced watercolors characterized by a strong erotic charge, exploring themes related to her personal experience. At the same time, between 1937 and 1950, he created a series of expressionist paintings. In 1948 he participated in the Venice Biennale, also exhibiting in 1950, 1956 and 1993. Beginning in 1951, the artist entered the phase of concrete abstractionism, which lasted until 1958. In the mid-1950s he joined the Concrete Art Movement in Turin, together with Biglione, Galvano, Parisot, Scroppo and Levi Montalcini. At the end of the decade, his research turned toward the informal, producing works with a strong material consistency (1959-1963). Later, between 1962 and 1968, he began experimenting with the Bricolage series, combining salvaged objects with spot painting. In the late 1960s (1968-1969), some of his works take on a strong political connotation. In the 1970s, the Gomme series (1970-1979) marks another important chapter in his research. Here, the artist uses inner tubes and tires to create works in which these materials combine in static, painterly compositions or dangle, evoking the entrails and guts of bodies. With the return to figuration in the 1980s (1980-1995), Carol Rama paints on pre-printed papers, creating a fantastical universe populated by bodies, objects and animals. In the 1990s, the series of The Mad Cow (1996-2001) became one of the most significant examples of her work. Until the 1980s, he exhibited mainly in Turin and other Italian cities, but his fame grew from the 1985 exhibition in Milan, curated by Lea Vergine. From then on, her solo exhibitions multiplied, both in Italy and abroad. In 2003, she was awarded the Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement at the Venice Biennale. Carol Rama died in Turin on September 24, 2015.

Carol Rama: brilliant unruliness, the retrospective in Turin

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