She is one of the outstanding female artists of Modernism, and yet she came to international fame late on. Today, she is recognized for her profound creativity as a pioneer of feminist art and a non-conformist. From abstract painting to surrealist object montages, Carol Rama continuously honed her craft. The SCHIRN presents the first major survey exhibition of the artist in Germany and pays tribute to her significant contribution to the Avant-garde. In this Digitorial, discover the captivating world of Carol Rama, a rebel of Modernism.

From the beginning of her career in the 1930s to the early 2000s, she forged an over 70-year-long oeuvre characterized by her experimentation-driven process. Working outside major schools and artist collectives and without a formal academic education, the artist found her way to new forms of expression. The continuous examination of her life – including deeply personal experiences and strokes of fate – binds the various periods of works like a common thread. Carol Rama deals with the universal human themes of sexuality, desire, illness, and death. She is a pioneer with the courage to be controversial and to cross boundaries in the same vein as Louise Bourgeois, Niki de Saint Phalle, and Maria Lassnig. Her subject matter anticipates the women’s movement and remains highly topical even today.

The perspective on her works was often obscured by the effects of her dazzling persona – the artist was a master of self-dramatization. Rama repeatedly depicts events from her own life, but the line between what she actually experienced and what she invented is blurred. These anecdotes are both poetic extensions and indispensable components of her artistic work.

For more than 70 years – from 1943 until her death in 2015 – Carol Rama lived and worked on the top floor of Via Napione 15 in Turin. From the late 1940s onwards, her live-in art studio was an unofficial meeting point for Turin’s intellectuals and creatives, with whom Rama cultivated lively exchanges. The apartment is regarded as an extension of her artistic sphere of influence. In it, an exuberant abundance of everyday objects and materials that the artist used in her works have been preserved and arranged on walls, shelves, and tables. Like a massive diorama of Rama and her creations, it gives the impression of a “work in progress”. While in her studio, one feels as if they are participating directly in the creative process when observing the cut-open tubes of paint, boxes full of dolls’ eyes, and stacks of shoemakers’ last.