Carol Rama: A Rebel of Modernity

Carol Rama (1918–2015) is one of those outstanding female artists of modernism who, in spite of impressive and multifaceted oeuvres, achieved fame late in their career. From October 11, 2024, to February 2, 2025, the Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt is presenting a large-scale survey of the Turin-based artist for the first time in Germany, featuring some 120 exhibits from all phases of her remarkable body of work.

Sexuality, passion, disease, death—Rama dedicated her art to the great human themes and fundamental experiences. Her depictions from the 1930s of female lust paved the way for today’s feminist art. Independent of artistic schools and groupings, the self-taught talent created over the course of 70 years an unconventional and highly personal oeuvre. Rama’s work defies simple categorization and is distinguished by an enthusiastic delight in experimentation. From her early days as an artist in the 1930s through to the early 2000s, she managed to reinvent her style every ten years or so with new groups of works, while always remaining true to herself. An adept iconoclast, she pushed the boundaries of artistic and social conventions in terms of both form and content.

Sebastian Baden, director of the Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt, on the exhibition: “With her art, Carol Rama succeeded in translating elementary experiences, abysmal fantasies, and the inconspicuous everyday into a powerful, independent body of work. The Schirn is now presenting this outstanding personality and modernist rebel for the first time in a major survey exhibition in Germany. Rama has long been a highly esteemed artist among experts, and the exhibition offers the public some real discoveries. Visitors will have a chance to engage with Rama’s unconventional oeuvre and life, which spanned almost an entire century.”

Rama spent her long life in Turin, in an apartment that also served as her studio on the top floor of 15 Via Napione that she had designed as a total work of art in its own right. Well-connected, she gathered around her a circle of intellectuals and artists and yet for a long time remained more or less unknown outside Italy. It was not until she had reached an advanced age that she was recognized with international survey exhibitions and prestigious awards including the Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement at the 2003 Venice Biennale.

Martina Weinhart, curator of the exhibition, on the artist: “Rama’s works are imbued with a very personal culture that lends them a seductive immediacy and authenticity. The artist once commented that ‘everything and nothing is autobiographical,’ and this is perhaps the key to her entire oeuvre. As a woman in a world in which men dominated not only the art scene, Rama focused on artistic freedom and self-empowerment as lifelong themes. At the same time, her work is inextricably bound up with her imposing personage, her biography, and her spectacularly decorated studio, a Gesamtkunstwerk in its own right. Not infrequently, the staging of this dazzling persona distracted attention away from her extraordinary art.”

The exhibition at the Schirn provides an overview of Rama’s complete oeuvre, including major works from all phases of her career, notably her now legendary early watercolors, hauntingly expressive portraits in oil on canvas, abstract paintings from her time as a member of the Movimento Arte Concreta (MAC), sensational mixed-media paintings and object montages in the Surrealist tradition, minimalist works made of fabric and industrial materials, and late paintings and drawings that revisit figuration.

The exhibition is supported by the Dr. Marschner Stiftung and the Verein der Freunde der Schirn Kunsthalle, with additional support from the Georg und Franziska Speyer’sche Hochschulstiftung.

An exhibition of the Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt in collaboration with the Kunstmuseum Bern.

A catalog Carol Rama: a Rebel of Modernity​, edited by Martina Weinhart, with essays by Martina Weinhart, Florian Werner, and Elena Volpato, as well as a biography by Theresa Dettinger and a joint foreword by the director of the Schirn, Sebastian Baden, and the director of the Kunstmuseum Bern, Nina Zimmer, has been published in a Gernan-English edition.

The Schirn offers a Digitorial® for the exhibition that provides insights into the artistic cosmos of Carol Rama, including interesting background information, cultural-historical references, and key exhibition content. The free digital art education format is available in German and English here.

Director: Dr. Sebastian Baden / Curators: Dr. Martina Weinhart, Schirn Kunsthalle / Press contact: Johanna Pulz (Head of Press/Public Relations): presse [at] schirn.de / T +49 (0) 69 29 98 82 148 / Press material.