Carol Rama
Danh Võ
19 July–28 September 2014
Press preview: Friday 18 July, 11am–2pm
Opening: Friday 18 July, 6:30–9pm
Nottingham Contemporary
Weekday Cross
Nottingham NG1 2GB
www.nottinghamcontemporary.org
Winner of the Golden Lion Award for Lifetime Achievement at the 2003 Venice Biennale, Carol Rama is a self-taught Italian artist whose artistic career began in 1936. She lives in Turin to this day.
Much of Rama’s work is a direct expression of the personal tragedies in her life. “I paint to heal myself,” Rama has said. As a young woman in fascist Italy, Rama began painting watercolours as a form of therapy. Her delicate but transgressive psychosexual images challenged the modernist canon and state censorship. She remained underappreciated by the international art world until the 1990s.
In the 1960s she began to apply psychologically charged found objects to the painting surface, including animal claws and dolls eyes. This body of work, called Bricolages, led to her celebrated abstract works made from bicycle inner tubes in the 1970s. The strips of black, grey and orange-red rubber have a sensual, flesh-like quality in these elegant and minimal compositions. They also allude to her father’s bicycle factory and the hardships that followed its closure.
Featuring 50 works, the exhibition presents a selection of her early watercolours and works from the Bricolage series including her tyre paintings. It precedes a large touring retrospective of Carol Rama’s work initiated by MACBA in Barcelona and co-produced with the Musée d’Art moderne de la Ville de Paris, the Espoo Museum of Modern Art in Finland and the Galleria Civica d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea, Torino (GAM).
Alongside Carol Rama, Nottingham Contemporary presents the first major UK exhibition by Danh Vō:
The next morning, he (the prince) went with it to the man, and said to him, “No one shall be my wife except for the one whose foot fits this golden shoe.”
The two sisters were happy to hear this, for they had pretty feet. With her mother standing by, the older one took the shoe into her bedroom to try it on. She could not get her big toe into it, for the shoe was too small for her. Then her mother gave her a knife and said, “Cut off your toe. When you are queen you will no longer have to go on foot.”
The girl cut off her toe, forced her foot into the shoe, swallowed the pain, and went out to the prince. He took her on his horse as his bride and rode away with her.
(Excerpt from: The Brothers Grimm, Aschenputtel [Cinderella], 1812)
Danh Vō was born on the island of Phu Quoc, South Vietnam, in 1975 and eventually granted political asylum in Denmark, where he was raised. Vō, now a Mexican resident, has had solo exhibitions at the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York, The Art Institute of Chicago and Kunsthalle Friedericianum in Kassel. In 2012 he won the HUGO BOSS PRIZE.
