BiografY

The childhood years passed comfortably with the Rama family enjoying a prosperous middle-class existence thanks to the father’s business; he had a body shop that produced automobile parts for prestigious car manufactures of the period. Olga benefitted from the family’s affluence, with horse-riding lessons and evenings spent singing opera arias.
The factory and the house were both in Via Digione 17. The studio of the painter Gemma Vercelli (1906 – 1995) was at number 19 in the same street and here Olga, still a child, used to pose as a model and, in watching the artist paint, also learnt the rudiments of the art. Painting and drawing would soon become a crucial part of Rama’s life.
However, already in the early 1920s, the first signs of financial difficulties in her father’s firm were beginning to emerge and it had definitively collapsed by the end of that decade, which also experienced the worldwide economic recession of the Great Depression. The family’s standard of living changed radically, to the extent that her mother, Marta, after suffering a brief period of neurological disorder resulting in hospitalization in the clinic “I due pini” in Turin, was obliged to set up her own activity, registered in 1933 as the “retail of fashion accessories and novelties, garments and furs”.
Pursuing her studies after the years of compulsory education, Olga enrolled in the Academy but never completed the course, recalcitrant in the face of any formal teaching. However, as an autodidact, she cultivated her passion for painting from her teenage years, a solace from everyday life and her anxieties, often making use of found materials.

In 1936, aged only eighteen, she painted Nonna Carolina, now in the GAM – Turin’s Civic Gallery of Modern and Contemporary Art.
Many others followed that first watercolour, together with oil paintings characterized by thick colour impastos. The subjects portrayed, especially in the watercolours, were details and often recalled people, situations or objects that could really be found in Rama’s life. Of an explicit sexual nature, many of these were produced with an elegant Schiele-like stroke: both heretical artists for subject matter and formal results.
The early 1940s proved to be very complicated for the artist. In 1942 her father, to whom she was very close, died, possibly committing suicide. Only a few moving watercolour portraits of him remain, executed in the immediately preceding years. And between 1942 and 1943, when Turin was the object of heavy bombing, Carol, her sister Emma and their mother were evacuated from Case Rama. Her painting output diminished drastically in these difficult years.
During the first half of the 1940s Carol moved from the family home to a top-floor, attic flat in Via Napione 15, a block built a few years earlier by the engineer Ponzano. She would remain to live and work here until her death.
The year 1945 or thereabouts was probably when the artist Felice Casorati first noticed Carol Rama’s talents for painting. She never formally became one of his pupils but Casorati, sensing her potential, followed and supported her and Rama certainly picked up on his suggestions and teachings.
This friendship with Felice Casorati led to other important contacts, firstly his wife, Daphne Maugham (niece of the famous writer Somerset Maughan), with whom she became firm friends, as borne out by the portrait of Carol painted by Daphne that she kept forever in Via Napione. It is also very probable that when Carol made some creations in fabric during the 1950s, Daphne herself helped her with the sewing. The bond uniting her with Felice Casorati and Daphne was subsequently extended to include their son Francesco and his wife Paola Zanetti. Knowing Felice Casorati also meant she was in a favourable position to meet other personalities on the contemporary cultural scene, such as Paola Levi Montalcini, Italo Cremona and Albino Galvano; in subsequent years, the latter would decisively influence her art, as well as write some of the most intense pages ever penned about her.
Aware of Rama’s potential, Casorati also started her off on her exhibition path.
Although information about an exhibition of Carol Rama’s works organized in 1945 in the Opera Pia Cucina Malati Poveri is scarce and for the most part oral – it would seem that the exhibition was closed even before the doors were opened because the images proposed would have offended common decency – it is certain that she took part in a group exhibition in 1946 in the Galleria Del Bosco (in which Casorati also appears among the exhibiting artists), which was followed in 1947 by a solo show of Carol Rama in the same gallery. In this first public exhibition of her works, which was widely reviewed, the artist showed drawings, etchings and paintings, with the exception of the earliest watercolours, which were only made public at the end of the 1970s.
In the immediate post-war years Edoardo Sanguineti entered Carol’s life; from that moment, artist and poet would remain bound by a profound and intellectually very stimulating friendship, which would end only with Sanguineti’s death in 2010.

In 1936, aged only eighteen, she painted Nonna Carolina, now in the GAM – Turin’s Civic Gallery of Modern and Contemporary Art.
Many others followed that first watercolour, together with oil paintings characterized by thick colour impastos. The subjects portrayed, especially in the watercolours, were details and often recalled people, situations or objects that could really be found in Rama’s life. Of an explicit sexual nature, many of these were produced with an elegant Schiele-like stroke: both heretical artists for subject matter and formal results.
The early 1940s proved to be very complicated for the artist. In 1942 her father, to whom she was very close, died, possibly committing suicide. Only a few moving watercolour portraits of him remain, executed in the immediately preceding years. And between 1942 and 1943, when Turin was the object of heavy bombing, Carol, her sister Emma and their mother were evacuated from Case Rama. Her painting output diminished drastically in these difficult years.
During the first half of the 1940s Carol moved from the family home to a top-floor, attic flat in Via Napione 15, a block built a few years earlier by the engineer Ponzano. She would remain to live and work here until her death.
The year 1945 or thereabouts was probably when the artist Felice Casorati first noticed Carol Rama’s talents for painting. She never formally became one of his pupils but Casorati, sensing her potential, followed and supported her and Rama certainly picked up on his suggestions and teachings.
This friendship with Felice Casorati led to other important contacts, firstly his wife, Daphne Maugham (niece of the famous writer Somerset Maughan), with whom she became firm friends, as borne out by the portrait of Carol painted by Daphne that she kept forever in Via Napione. It is also very probable that when Carol made some creations in fabric during the 1950s, Daphne herself helped her with the sewing. The bond uniting her with Felice Casorati and Daphne was subsequently extended to include their son Francesco and his wife Paola Zanetti. Knowing Felice Casorati also meant she was in a favourable position to meet other personalities on the contemporary cultural scene, such as Paola Levi Montalcini, Italo Cremona and Albino Galvano; in subsequent years, the latter would decisively influence her art, as well as write some of the most intense pages ever penned about her.
Aware of Rama’s potential, Casorati also started her off on her exhibition path.
Although information about an exhibition of Carol Rama’s works organized in 1945 in the Opera Pia Cucina Malati Poveri is scarce and for the most part oral – it would seem that the exhibition was closed even before the doors were opened because the images proposed would have offended common decency – it is certain that she took part in a group exhibition in 1946 in the Galleria Del Bosco (in which Casorati also appears among the exhibiting artists), which was followed in 1947 by a solo show of Carol Rama in the same gallery. In this first public exhibition of her works, which was widely reviewed, the artist showed drawings, etchings and paintings, with the exception of the earliest watercolours, which were only made public at the end of the 1970s.
In the immediate post-war years Edoardo Sanguineti entered Carol’s life; from that moment, artist and poet would remain bound by a profound and intellectually very stimulating friendship, which would end only with Sanguineti’s death in 2010.

Carol was a woman of great intellectual curiosity and assiduously attended events and exhibitions in Turin, meeting and regularly receiving many of the town’s cultural elite, especially intellectuals from various (not only artistic) spheres, such as the musicologist Massimo Mila and the architect Carlo Mollino, and always keeping abreast of political and social events.
She established bonds of friendship with many Turin families; each of them, for a longer or shorter time, saw her regularly, helped her, extended invitations to her and also supported her in practical difficulties, along with providing a deep well of affection. Among them all, two families in particular would be linked to her in profound and unwavering friendship, on both sides, from the 1960s until the artist’s death: the Levi family and the Accornero family.
In the 1964 solo show staged in both Genoa and Turin, for the first time a group of paintings was exhibited in which Carol supplements an Informel-style dash of colour with a collage of objects such as dolls’ eyes, leftover scraps from metal working, syringes, stones, rubber stoppers and lots more: materials and found objects, charged with life’s experiences, which become part of the picture’s composition. Edoardo Sanguineti’s interest and empathy with these works led him to naming the production of this decade “Bricolage”, reproposing a term used by Claude Lévi-Strauss in Il pensiero selvaggio (La pensée sauvage, 1962; The Savage Mind, 1966) which had just been published (1964) in Italian by Boringhieri; he even inserted lines from his verses in some of Carol Rama’s paintings. Sanguineti went on to write texts for the Bricolage that are still essential today for accessing those works of the 1960s.

The 1970s mark a particular period in Rama’s life and career. The last exhibition that La Bussola dedicated to her, in 1971, moved away from the preceding production and presented works of a completely new stamp. Edoardo Sanguineti accompanied this transition and in the text reviewing the exhibition emphasized the abolition of the Informel dashes, and therefore of the underlying pictorialism, in favour of the experience of the painting in itself, reduced to its minimum terms: on white or black surfaces Rama arranged bicycle tyres in balanced abstract compositions, enlivened only by chromatic differences and traces of former use.
In the same year, 1971, photographs document the start of the artist’s collaboration with Luciano Anselmino, a gallerist operating on an international level, who represented, among others, Andy Warhol and Man Ray (the only person to represent the latter artist in Europe). Thanks to Anselmino, Carol Rama met and regularly saw Man Ray, creating a reciprocally stimulating relationship with him in the first half of the 1970s, as demonstrated by works gifted from Man Ray to the painter or by his poetic introduction to the catalogue of an exhibition of Carol Rama in the Galleria Il Fauno (1974), or by the many works that Carol Rama dedicates to Man Ray. In those same years Rama also met Alexander Jolas, an important gallerist on an international level. And in the early 1970s, thanks to Anselmino’s support, Carol Rama was able to travel to Paris, New York and Rome.
Anselmino devoted two solo shows to the artist before his premature death. The first in Turin in 1974 in the Galleria Il Fauno, where both bicycle tyre paintings and interesting “sewn” works were presented (in the catalogue a text by Man Ray, in which the name of the artist is evoked several times in anagrams). And the second in Luciano Anselmino’s gallery in Milan, which Alexandre Jolas had just taken over, in 1976. The latter was reviewed in Data by Giancarlo Salzano, a sensitive intellectual who had moved at the end of the 1960s from Milan to Turin. Here Salzano came into contact with the artistic circles, and in particular with Aldo Passoni, managing director of the Modern Art Gallery, and with Carol Rama, with whom he established an enduring friendship that would last from the first half of the 1970s up to the start of the new century. A keen admirer of the artist’s work, he would later become her gallerist.

In 1979 the Galleria Martano in Turin devoted an important exhibition to the artist. A staunch supporter of Carol Rama already for a decade, Liliana Dematteis presented, thanks to the mediation of a dear friend of both of them, Luigi Campi, a first group of watercolours from the 1930s and 1940s, until then unknown to the public.
Then, in 1980 Giancarlo Salzano inaugurated his gallery in Piazza Carignano, a space previously occupied by the Galleria Il Fauno, with an exhibition dedicated to the artist in which he presented other early watercolours accompanied by more recent works. Since then and up to 2000, he regularly staged many exhibitions of Carol Rama, constantly updating the public with her new work.
A leap towards wider renown was achieved in 1985 however, with the first big exhibition organized in a public space, curated by Lea Vergine. Carol had already been included by Lea Vergine in L’altra metà dell’avanguardia in 1980, a group exhibition that is still regarded as a milestone in the identification and presentation of work by twentieth-century artists. With Carol Rama, the anthological show expertly hung by Achille Castiglioni in the Sagrato of Milan Cathedral, Lea Vergine succeeded in presenting and in making known a large part of the artist’s production from the whole span of her career, combined with objects from her house-studio and documents.
This important exhibition was followed by others, among which one in 1987 in the Galleria dell’Oca in Rome with a presentation by Giuliano Briganti and the next year in the Casa del Mantegna with a text, among others, by Giorgio Manganelli.
The year 1989 marked an important stage in Carol Rama’s career: one of the most brilliant art historians and critics, Paolo Fossati, curated a solo show of her work in the Circolo degli Artisti in Turin. Carol Rama often returns in articles and exhibitions curated by Fossati, who constantly strove to promote her work, which he strongly supported and encouraged.
Meanwhile, in the 1980s new types of work appeared, among which splendid examples showing a return to figurative painting, executed with complex techniques and bright colours: worlds populated with human figures, angels and animals, special geometries, landscapes and fantastic scenes on old paper that had already been printed on and that often dated to the century before. The pre-existing engraved signs were a pretext for triggering her painting, and then also became an integral part of it.

In this arc of time Carol Rama received important public recognition. In 1993 Achille Bonito Oliva devoted a solo show to her at the XLV Biennale of Venice, whose hang by Corrado Levi was exemplary and became a model for many other subsequent exhibitions. Ten years later, in 2003, the artist received the prestigious Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement at the Venice Biennale of that year, directed by Francesco Bonami.
From the mid-1990s Rama developed a new subject that would become a constant up to 2000: after having seen images related to the so-called “mad cow disease” on television, she constructed a new series of powerful images around the theme: paintings, drawings and engravings. The engravings: after the magnificent series of the Parche (1944–47) and a few further trials in the 1940s and 1950s, Rama put her hand to this technique once more at Paolo Fossati’s urging, thanks to the printshop and gallery of Franco Masoero, who would flank her from the graphic design onwards, with an acceleration in production from 1998.
In that same year the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam presented a broad-ranging retrospective of Carol Rama’s work, curated by Maria Cristina Mundici. This exhibition, with its next stop at the ICA in Boston, marked the artist’s arrival on the international scene, which would be fully achieved only a decade later. In the local sphere, in Turin, two galleries, together with the gallery of Salzano, assiduously presented work by the artist: the Galleria Del Ponte and the Galleria Carlina, which confirmed interest in the painter with three monographic exhibitions.

The exhibitions multiplied, from the 2004 anthological show curated by Guido Curto and Giorgio Verzotti in the Fondazione Sandretto in Turin (then travelling to the Mart in Rovereto and the Baltic Museum in Gateshead) to the exhibition in Palazzo Ducale in Genoa of 2008 curated by Marco Vallora.
From 2009 the Isabella Bortolozzi Gallery in Berlin exhibited works by the artist and inserted her into the circuit of international collectors. Rama’s fame definitively crossed national borders with the large retrospective organized by the MACBA in Barcelona and by the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris (curated by Teresa Grandas and Beatriz Preciado), which, from Barcelona in 2014, travelled to Paris in 2015 (under the hand of Anne Dressen) and subsequently to Helsinki and Dublin, to end its tour in 2016 at the GAM – Civic Gallery of Modern and Contemporary Art in Turin.
The circle of international admirers of Carol’s work widened. A similar trend has been seen regarding public spaces: the New Museum in New York dedicated a large anthological show to her the following year, wanted by the museum’s director, Massimiliano Gioni.
Sadly the artist was to enjoy nothing of this national and international fame. She died on 24 September 2015 in her house-studio in Turin, where she had lived uninterruptedly since the 1940s. Her last known work dates to 2007 and ends an intense career that lasted more than seventy years.

Lea Vergine (ed), Carol Rama, Mazzotta, 1985 Milan
Paolo Fossati (ed), Carol Rama, Umberto Allemandi & C., Turin 1989
Achille Bonito Oliva, Carol Rama, dal presente al passato, 1994-1936, Bocca editori, Milan 1994
Cristina Mundici (ed), carolrama, Charta, Milan 1998
Luigina Tozzato e Claudio Zambianchi (ed), Edoardo Sanguineti Carol Rama, Franco Masoero Edizioni d’Arte, Turin 2002
Guido Curto e Giorgio Verzotti (ed), Carol Rama, Skira editore, Milan 2004
Alexandra Wetzel (ed), Catalogo ragionato dell’opera incisa, Franco Masoero Edizioni d’Arte, Turin 2006
Marco Vallora (ed), Carol Rama, Skira, Milan 2008
Gianna Besson, Carol Rama casta sfrontata stella, Prinp Editore, Turin 2012
Maria Cristina Mundici e Bepi Ghiotti, Carol Rama. Il magazzino dell’anima, Skira, Milan 2014
Anne Dressen, Teresa Grandas e Beatriz Preciado, The Passion According to Carol Rama, Barcelona 2014
Helga Christoffersen, Massimiliano Gioni, Carol Rama: Antibodies, New Museum, New York 2017
Valentina Castellani, Robert Storr, Flavia Frigeri, Rober Lumley, Carol Rama, Eye of Eyes, Lévy Gorvy, New York 2019
Maria Cristina Mundici, con Raffaella Roddolo e Maria Grazia Messina, Carol Rama. Catalogo ragionato, Skira, Milano 2023

Just published: Carol Rama. Catalogue raisonné 1936-2005, edited by Maria Cristina Mundici with Raffaella Roddolo and Maria Grazia Messina (Milan 2023, Skira)