She began her artistic production in the mid-1930s, before the onset of the Second World War. And, today, she appears as an essential artist for understanding the mutations of representation in the twentieth century and the later work of artists like Cindy Sherman, Kara Walker, Sue Williams, Kiki Smith and Elly Strik.”īorn in 1918 in Turin, Rama never received formal training. Credited with pioneering such radical ways of painting as “organic abstraction” and “queer abstraction,” as described by the curators of the traveling retrospective, “Rama invents sensurrealism, an art of the visceral-specific, porn brut, organic abstraction. An artist far ahead of her time, Rama proposes an embodied vision of humanity beyond binary gender confines, figuring the body as a site of intensity, desire, affect, and resistance to normalcy in a multitude of ways and media over the course of her seven-decade career. From October 2014 until August 2016, the retrospective exhibition The Passion According to Carol Rama, co-organized by and first held at the Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona and the Musée d’art moderne de la Ville de Paris, has traveled to the Espoo Museum of Modern Art, Finland the Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin and the Galleria Civica d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea, Turin. A figure parallel to such artists as Louise Bourgeois, Méret Oppenheim, and Eva Hesse, Rama has received her place in art history since 2003, when she was awarded the Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement at the 50th Venice Biennale. The influence of her innovative oeuvre on both her contemporaries and a younger generation of artists worldwide has been recognized internationally. Although subject to censorship and marginalization during her lifetime due to the highly subversive nature of her work, Rama has been celebrated in recent years as a key avant-garde figure in the development of both abstraction and figuration from 1930s onward.

Carol Rama’s iconoclastic practice holds a singular place in the history of twentieth-century art.

The paris opera normalcy forges ahead