CAROL RAMA

‘I See You You See Me’ eschews the categorization of her work into discrete periods in order to trace the remarkable continuity of focused experimentation and profound cultural foresight as the throughlines of her practice. The prescient quality of Rama’s mind—her instinctive apprehension of how her art would progress—is apparent in even the earliest composition on view, ‘Dorina (Appassionata)’ (1943). This small watercolor foreshadows what would become an enduring autobiographical preoccupation with the body, desire and agency.

Rama’s figuration evolved markedly by the end of the forties with paintings such as ‘Pagliacci (Clowns)’ (1949). Here, a prominent grid structure underpins the titular clowns’ costumes and faces—with eyes that hold the viewer’s gaze with a deliberate, almost sentient intensity—presaging her decisive move toward abstraction in 1951 and anticipating her engagement with the Movimento Arte Concreta (MAC), the Milan-based movement which sought to establish a framework for rigorous, rational, non-representational art based on geometric forms and mathematical principles. While MAC’s axioms provided important structure for Rama’s practice at the time, her work quickly assumed a more dynamic and irregular character, ultimately leading to her departure from the group around 1960—a testament to the independent vision that would come to distinguish her work.

Courtesy Hauser & Wirth.