Carol Rama: Appassionata

by Edoardo Sanguineti, Lea Vergine, Carol Rama (Artist)

Appassionata offers a compelling cross-section of Carol Rama's lifetime of work. Early on, she combined the surreal and the erotic in her watercolors and drawings. Delicately rendered, they show fragmented, injured female bodies, male figures charged with sexual symbolism, as well as objects like artificial limbs, shoes, and animals. Born in 1918 in Turin, Rama took up her radical and taboo-breaking position as early as 1936, anticipating positions on the body and sexuality that became prevalent only in the 1960s and 1970s. During the 1950s, Rama addressed abstraction, increasingly incorporating body-related materials like animal claws, doll's eyes, or bicycle inner tubes. In the early 1980s, she returned to her earlier erotic subjects, to which she remains devoted. Into them she now also includes scenes of everyday life and mythological figures, often depicted ironically. Apart from a wonderful overview of Rama's work, this publication also sheds light on her lifelong artistic involvement with the poet Edoardo Sanguineti.

Hardcover

First published January 11, 2004

About the author

Edoardo Sanguineti was an Italian writer. During the 1960s he was a leader of the neo avant-garde Gruppo 63 movement, founded in 1963 at Solunto.
He was also an active translator of Joyce, Molière, Shakespeare, Bertolt Brecht, and select Greek and Latin authors.
From 1979 until 1983, Sanguineti was a member of the Chamber of Deputies of the Italian Parliament. He was elected as an independent on the list of the PCI.