Hauser & Wirth has begun representing the estate of Italian artist Carol Rama, who died at the age of 97 in 2015. The gallery’s presidents Iwan Wirth, Manuela Wirth, and Marc Payot announced the news. Galerie Isabella Bortolozzi will continue to represent Rama’s estate in Berlin. A solo exhibition of the artist’s work will open this May at Hauser & Wirth’s gallery in New York.
Rama is known for her provocative explorations of sex and the body. Corporeal forms throughout her painting, sculpture, drawing, and printmaking thematized lust, illness, and death. The artist never adhered to one style and often incorporated raw materials including teeth, glass eyes, beads, bicycle tires, syringes, and animal claws into her work. She was self-taught, and though she regularly exhibited and made work over the course of nearly eight decades, she only received major acclaim late in life.
“Self-taught, fiercely independent and utterly untamed, Rama was a pioneer—she was unafraid to be as visceral and autobiographical as others were studied and protracted,” said Manuela Wirth in a press statement. “Her legacy already is interwoven into the fabric of our gallery’s history through familial connection as we were first introduced to Carol’s art through my mother Ursula Hauser, a longtime champion. And we see such powerful connections between this artist’s concerns and those of other remarkable Hauser & Wirth artists, including Louise Bourgeois, Eva Hesse, Maria Lassnig and Lee Lozano who, like Carol, were underappreciated during their lifetimes and now are considered titans of art history. That so many of our younger gallery artists deeply admire Carol Rama is a sure signal that there will be very exciting dialogue and discovery ahead.”
Born in Turin, Italy in 1918, Rama’s turbulent childhood and family life informed the diaristic, raw nature of her work, which she sometimes viewed as therapy. Her first major series, figurative watercolors she made in the 1930s and 1940s, featured amputated bodies and unattached limbs. They were considered too provocative, however, and the police shut down her debut exhibition in 1945 with allegations of obscenity.
Rama went on to explore abstraction and briefly joined Italy’s Movimento Arte Concreta (M.A.C.). During this time, the figurative elements of her work faded into patterned, geometric forms. The artist deepened her exploration with unconventional materials, which she paired with splashes of paint on canvas that she thought resembled bodily fluids. Her father had owned an automobile and bicycle factory, and during the 1970s Rama incorporated associated materials into her work; she made collages with dangling inner tubes sourced from bicycles, which hung like male genitalia or intestines. She worked in tangent with the Arte Povera movement, although she was never a member of it.
Rama’s work only gained real momentum in the 1990s. She was awarded the Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement at the Venice Biennale in 2003, and solo presentations of her work have been held at institutions including the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, the Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris, and the New Museum. Her work is included in the collections of museums such as the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), the Tate London, and the Uffizi Gallery in Florence.
