Carol Rama passed away just over a year ago in her Turin, in her home-studio on Via Napione which will soon become a homemuseum.
A grand age of 97, her long hair plaited around her forehead, her face marked with wrinkles, great pain and passion, the one true constant of her life. It is impossible to describe her art: Carolina Rama was a true outsider in the way she lived her life, the way she talked and how
and what she created. Everything about her was revolutionary, irregular and innovative. An artist tout court, romantically attached to an almost bohemian model. Her life was complicated, dotted with pain and trauma, which over the years she learned to work through and exorcise in the only way she knew how: creating. “I paint by instinct and I paint with passion. And with anger, violence and sorrow. And with a certain fetishism. And with joy and melancholy mixed together. And especially with anger. My paintings will appeal to anyone who has suffered.” Art as a way to express our inner selves, almost vomiting all that interior anguish and blues: nightmares, desire, passion, pain and grief, but also joie de vivre and unconditional wonder at life and beauty. “Work, painting, for me has always been something
that made me feel less unhappy, less poor, less unattractive and even less ignorant… I paint to heal myself.”
A successful, acclaimed and innovative career which also involved great intellectual bonds: Felice Casorati was her guide in the early years, the poet Edoardo Sanguineti would write memorable pages about her work while Massimo Mila and Carlo Mollino were always
sources of new stimuli and ideas and gallerist Luciano Anselmino would open up the international world by introducing her to Andy Warhol and Man Ray.

Intersecting experimentation would continue in a lively succession of different techniques throughout her life: watercolour in her younger days, oil paints in the War years, the abstract phase of the Fifties, the ‘bricolage’ of the Sixties which came to a head in the Seventies, when her compositions opened up to a new material: the rubber of inner tubes and seals, applied onto monochrome canvases as though it was paint yet maintaining all the incisiveness of the material itself. The rubber became skin and flesh, and recalled the work of her father, a small businessman who manufactured bicycles among other things. She returned to figure drawing in the Eighties with pre-printed
sheets and bodies outlined by confident and rough strokes à la Schiele. And then her final works in the early 2000s, which retraced, mixed and engaged with all her styles and directions.
There were countless exhibitions dedicated to her, the first was famously shut down by the police before it even opened in 1945, due to its indecent and provocative content, and the latest is currently on at Turin’s Galleria d’Arte Moderna, entitled, after due consideration, “Passion according to Carol Rama”. The exhibition traces the career of a figure who was vital to the Italian and international artistic panorama, as demonstrated by the Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement awarded to her at the Venice Biennale in 2003. It was an important recognition for a great woman who created a singular way to live and exist from art, through a painting as profound as the unconscious, never consistent, never conforming and always defined by that unbreakable connection with her deep inner self and daily life. The world of international collectors did not just stand aside of course, there is great demand for her on the market and collectors are fierce and passionate. Prices are rising exponentially, an unequivocal sign that Carol, in negotiating the twentieth century with her art, successfully conveyed her passion for life and beauty and her intelligence as an aware,
visceral and unstoppable woman. 
by Francesca Benfante 

THE DEPARTMENT