Lugano
Carol Rama was born in Turin in 1918. Her work mainly dealt with themes of sexuality and eroticism, with frank emphasis on female pleasure. Working in many different media, Rama also explored abstraction and assemblage in the style of the Arte Povera movement. She began painting around the age of 18, and was a self-taught artist. Her early works were watercolour paintings, but in the 1950s’ she began incorporating objects such as hypodermic syringes and small mechanical parts into her art. In the 1960s, her primary material became strips of rubber from tyres. Living under Mussolini’s fascism, Rama’s work was frequently the target of censorship, and her first exhibition in 1945 at Galleria Faber in Turin was shut down by the authorities. Rama’s work remained largely unknown outside of Italy until later in her life, when she received the Golden Lion award at the 2003 Venice Biennale. She has also had solo exhibitions at Maccarone Gallery in New York, a retrospective at the Barcelona Museum of Contemporary Art, and a solo exhibition scheduled for 2016 at the Galleria Civica d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea in Turin, traveling on to the Irish Museum of Modern Art in Dublin. She died in Turin in 2015.