Carol Rama. Rebel of modernity

Carol Rama’s singular oeuvre is being brought to the fore in a major retrospective organised by the Kunstmuseum Bern from 7 March to 13 July 2025. The exhibition, entitled Carol Rama. Rebelle de la modernité, brings together 110 works spanning more than 70 years of creative work by an artist who long remained on the fringes of the art world, before being established as one of the great female voices of the European avant-garde. Self-taught, unclassifiable and radical, Carol Rama created a powerful, visceral body of work that was always in tension with the social and artistic norms of her time.

A life marked by pain and resistance

Born Olga Carolina Rama in Turin on 17 April 1918, Carol Rama grew up in a family of industrialists. Her father ran a car bodywork factory, a prosperous business until the economic crisis of 1929 led to its bankruptcy. Carol’s adolescence was profoundly affected by her mother’s psychiatric problems, which led to her being admitted to the I Due Pini hospital, and by her father’s presumed suicide in 1942. These dramatic events were to have an indelible influence on all her work, which focused on themes such as sexuality, madness, illness and death.

Carol Rama chose art very early on as a means of psychological survival: ‘For me, work, painting, has always been something that has given me the feeling of being less unhappy, less poor, less ugly and even less ignorant… I paint to cure myself,’ she said in an interview with Corrado Levi and Filippo Fossati. Her apartment-studio in Via Napione in Turin became a bubbling creative centre and an intellectual salon frequented by artists, poets and thinkers throughout her life.

A free, radical, unclassifiable work

A self-taught artist, Carol Rama traversed the 20th century without ever submitting to the dictates of art history. From the 1930s onwards, she created a series of erotic watercolours called Appassionata, which challenged the social and religious taboos of the time. One of her first exhibitions, scheduled for 1945 in Turin, was banned for obscenity even before it opened.

In the 1950s, Rama briefly joined the Movimento Arte Concreta (MAC) and explored geometric abstraction. But it was in free experimentation with paint, assemblages and unusual materials that she found her voice. Over the decades, she has used inner tubes, doll’s eyes, industrial glue and textiles in plastic compositions that she describes as bricolages, a term borrowed from Claude Lévi-Strauss and popularised by her friend the poet Edoardo Sanguineti.

Carol Rama, Sans titre, 1950, Huile sur toile 80 × 100 cm, Collection privée, Turin, Photo: Gabriele Gaidano, Turin © 2025 Archivio Carol Rama, Torino

Her work spans a range of styles, from surrealism to Arte Povera, from minimalism to the return to figuration in the 1980s. Yet her work remains fundamentally unclassifiable, at once visceral, intimate and political. Carol Rama has never sought to please, but to express the unspeakable. She would only receive institutional recognition at the end of her life, notably with the Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement at the Venice Biennale in 2003.

A retrospective in six chapters

Presented in six thematic chapters, the exhibition at the Kunstmuseum Bern explores the artist’s different creative periods: from provocative watercolours to organic assemblages in the 1960s, through to her return to figuration in the 1980s. Through a rich and daring selection of works, this retrospective pays tribute to a visionary artist who long remained in the shadows, but is now hailed for her pioneering role in the history of feminist art.