.jpg?w=1)
Lot Essay
‘I’d like to paint everything black – it’s a kind of incineration, a kind of wonderful agony’
–Carol Rama
'Expressionist, Surrealist, Pop, Minimalist: Rama is all those things, and sometimes even appears anachronistic, knowingly outside the big identified movements and, for that very reason, eternally contemporary'
–Anne Dresse
With its harmoniously-ordered mixed media collage, Mucca Pazza (‘Mad Cow’) exhibits the potent combination of expressive freedom and formal poise that defines Carol Rama’s practice. The majority of the work sits on a background of black paint, bisected vertically by a cylindrical strip of grey rubber taken from the inner tube of a tyre; to its right is a section of similar material, pressed flat into a suede-like texture. Two orange tubes curve across the black space, from which hang, fruit-like, a pair of dark grey and ochre forms, also of flattened and painted rubber. There is a serenity to this image, but also a sense of the uncanny. The tubes have a bodily fleshiness, as if pulled from a living being and stretched across the canvas, while the bulbous shapes evoke both the udder of a cow and the human breast. Executed in 1999, Mucca Pazza tells several personal stories. It is one of a major series named for the BSE epidemic, television footage of which recalled the traumatic scenes Rama had witnessed as a teenager at her mother’s psychiatric hospital in the 1940s. Rama’s use of inner tubing also recalls her father, a small-time automobile and bicycle factory-owner who committed suicide after being declared bankrupt. In her art, Rama’s pain becomes a source of complex pleasure. The work exudes a sensual beauty in its curvaceous forms, and is further enriched by its use of colours, to each of which Rama appertained significance. Yellow reminded her of Gustav Klimt, red provided an erotic excitement, and grey represented her desire for high culture. But it was the black that dominates the composition’s background that Rama found the most potent. ‘I’d like to paint everything black,’ she said; ‘it’s a kind of incineration, a kind of wonderful agony’ (C. Rama, quoted in C. Levi, ‘Colours to Carol Rama’, in M. C. Mundici and B. Ghiotti, Inside Carol Rama, Turin, 2014, pp. 166-7).
–Carol Rama
'Expressionist, Surrealist, Pop, Minimalist: Rama is all those things, and sometimes even appears anachronistic, knowingly outside the big identified movements and, for that very reason, eternally contemporary'
–Anne Dresse
With its harmoniously-ordered mixed media collage, Mucca Pazza (‘Mad Cow’) exhibits the potent combination of expressive freedom and formal poise that defines Carol Rama’s practice. The majority of the work sits on a background of black paint, bisected vertically by a cylindrical strip of grey rubber taken from the inner tube of a tyre; to its right is a section of similar material, pressed flat into a suede-like texture. Two orange tubes curve across the black space, from which hang, fruit-like, a pair of dark grey and ochre forms, also of flattened and painted rubber. There is a serenity to this image, but also a sense of the uncanny. The tubes have a bodily fleshiness, as if pulled from a living being and stretched across the canvas, while the bulbous shapes evoke both the udder of a cow and the human breast. Executed in 1999, Mucca Pazza tells several personal stories. It is one of a major series named for the BSE epidemic, television footage of which recalled the traumatic scenes Rama had witnessed as a teenager at her mother’s psychiatric hospital in the 1940s. Rama’s use of inner tubing also recalls her father, a small-time automobile and bicycle factory-owner who committed suicide after being declared bankrupt. In her art, Rama’s pain becomes a source of complex pleasure. The work exudes a sensual beauty in its curvaceous forms, and is further enriched by its use of colours, to each of which Rama appertained significance. Yellow reminded her of Gustav Klimt, red provided an erotic excitement, and grey represented her desire for high culture. But it was the black that dominates the composition’s background that Rama found the most potent. ‘I’d like to paint everything black,’ she said; ‘it’s a kind of incineration, a kind of wonderful agony’ (C. Rama, quoted in C. Levi, ‘Colours to Carol Rama’, in M. C. Mundici and B. Ghiotti, Inside Carol Rama, Turin, 2014, pp. 166-7).