This major retrospective was Carol Rama’s first ever UK solo exhibition. Looking in-depth at her influential career spanning over seven decades, the show presents over 100 works that range in media from painting to drawing, watercolour, sculpture and print.

Olga Carolina Rama was born in Turin in 1918, where she still lives and works. This self-taught artist who paints ‘to heal herself and to express her fears and anguish’, has been making innovative, provocative works since the mid 1930s, anticipating many of the major artistic movements of our day.

The exhibition began with a series of fascinating, autobiographical watercolours, created from 1936 to 1940 during the mental illness of Rama’s mother, in an Italy under Fascist rule. It then followed the development of Rama’s career by showing examples of her very personal exploration of Surrealism and Concrete Art, to which she brought great compositional freedom. In the 1960s and 1970s Rama’s interest in the human body and organic materials was explored through the use of actual objects such as corks, animal claws, skins and tyres. From the 1980s Rama returned to figuration and to some of the colourful, transgressive figures which populated her early works - images as alive and provocative today as they were seventy years ago.

Exhibition organised by Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, Turin in collaboration with MART. 
Museo di Arte Moderna e Contemporanea di Trento e Rovereto.