Artist Carol Rama in Frankfurt’s Schirn | EUROtoday

So viel Erotik conflict lange nicht in der Schirn. Schon am Eingang zum zweiten Abschnitt der diesmal labyrinthisch verbauten, sonst ja nur schlauchartigen Kegelbahn der Kunsthalle drängt sich einem das quadratische Bild „Die Metzgerei“ von 1980 ebenso fleischlich wie martialisch entgegen: Eine dunkel gekleidete Frau mit breitem Gesicht, wirbelnden Haarschnecken und grauem Lidschatten schwingt ein Messer, hinter ihr hängen aufgereiht Schweinehälften und Salami, vor ihr liegen Haxen, ein abgehackter Schweinskopf und der eines Pferdes. Der enge Raum wird von Fleischfarben und Schmalzgelb im Hintergrund bestimmt. Lasziv zischelt tiefrot ihre schlangenartige Zunge aus dem Mund.

Nach diesem Auftakt zu einer Art Frankfurter Gabinetto Segreto (wie einst in Neapels Archäologischem Nationalmuseum mit den pompejanischen Anzüglichkeiten) sowie einer expliziten Warnung an die „unter Sechzehnjährigen“, bitte nur in Begleitung ihrer Eltern in dieses freizügige Kabinett zu gehen, folgen „120 Tage von Sodom“ auf Papier. Eine bis auf den wie Feuer lodernden gelben Blumenkranz auf dem Kopf Splitternackte lässt sich auf ein Bett fallen und entblößt dabei fröhlich ihre Vulva; die schon vertraute spitze Zunge streckt sie dabei ebenso in die Höhe wie ihre gespreizten Beine mit den schwarzen hochhackigen Schuhen daran. Schuhe überhaupt füllen mehrere weitere Blätter dergestalt, dass es sich dabei weniger um stolz ausgebreitete Sammlerstücke als vielmehr um Fetischobjekte handelt, wie die zwischen den wild umhergeworfenen Schuhen eingestreuten Penisse erahnen lassen. Das erotischste Aquarell (denn die Serie von 1936 bis 1946 heißt italienisch einfach „Acquerelli“) ist eine Prothesen-Madonna der Fahrradreifen. Roh wie eine von Ernst Ludwig Kirchners nackten Holzskulpturen „steht“ sie beinlos über roten Pumps und ihrem gleichfarbigen, leicht geöffneten Geschlecht verkrümmt vor einem Bett mit Matratze in Hellblau, was ihr eine Art Kasten-Heiligenschein verleiht, seit frühchristlicher Zeit Symbol noch lebender Heiliger auf Ikonen. Ihr Körper aber ist ein Torso, dessen amputierte Arme von je drei Achter-verbeulten Reifen mit wirbelnden Speichen fortgesetzt wird, ebenso wie aus ihrem Haar abermals der schon bekannte gelbe Blütenkranz entspringt, der surreal ihre in alle Richtungen schießenden Gedanken oder Gelüste anzuzeigen scheint.

Instinctively, one assigns these partly crude (a flower-wreathed naked woman also appears as a defecator on another page) yet tender eroticism to a woman. But who is this artist who captured such daring things in series in 1936? It was Carol Rama, born in Turin in 1918 to a well-off middle-class family, who dared to make such pictures at the height of surrealism, but was not allowed to exhibit in a gallery in her Catholic and at the same time fascist hometown after an express warning from the Vatican. Right from the start of her first pictures, which were important to her as a radical expression of her love life and her subjectivity (she was self-taught, she had dropped out of academy training), she fell into a hole, so to speak, which was to happen more often in her ninety-seven-year life.

The “Acquerelli” collection, which was revealing even for surrealists, was to not be exhibited publicly till 1979; she spent a big a part of her legendary creative work spanning seventy years in the identical small studio in Turin, whose home windows she coated with darkish material and whose partitions she coated with black Shoe polish and skin-like pink paint in an expressive gesture. In addition to the few gross sales over lengthy dry spells, there was psychological devastation that stemmed from her childhood – her mom ended up in a psychiatric hospital, her father killed himself in 1942 after his once-thriving firm for automotive components and particularly rubber tires failed for the reason that Great Depression in 1929 and the household regularly impoverished. When Carol Rama obtained the Venice Biennale’s Golden Lion for her life’s work in 2004 on the age of 86, she reacted to the award with the rebellious retort that it crammed her with worry and made her bodily ailing, as a result of if she was actually nearly as good as them Award guarantees, then why did it take so lengthy?

The tragedy stays of an excellent work born of ache, from which 120 works are proven: she transforms the blows of destiny, which may hardly be separated from her works, right into a power. In the Jawlensky-like anti-portraits of her “Tarocchi” collection from 1948 onwards, she flattens the colour within the haggard faces and dims the temper within the image with earthy colours within the backgrounds and grey and brown blouses. What is especially spectacular is a head that’s utterly inexperienced and desires time to be peeled out of the equally inexperienced background.

Even in Rama’s abstract phases in the fifties and then again in the seventies, the inner conflicts that she could only overcome through art come to the surface of the picture in the materials used. In the BSE series “La mucca pazza”, “The Mad Cow”, in 1996, Rama forms udders, cow tails – and tongues again – from bicycle tubes, one of her most used materials from the technical curiosities of her father’s factory as well as from her childhood memories! – made of rubber. Her series “Gomme” (“Rubbers”) transforms tubes into ever new emotional shapes. In 1970, for instance, in “Autorattristatrice n. 10” (an Italian phrase play on “self-portrait” in addition to “auto” and “rattristrare”, to make unhappy), she folds a black rubber floor on the canvas within the form of a vulva that curves in. In truth, the now widespread time period bricolage for such materials photos was coined by her pal Sanguineti to explain her work.

If one might nonetheless view the used rubber tires, discovered objects and in addition incessantly used coarse burlap and plucked materials as a common a part of the Arte Povera motion radiating from Turin with its poor supplies, taxidermic or doll eyes are an integral a part of many photos over the course of her seventy-year oeuvre. A deeply disturbing component of surrealism, from Luis Buñuel’s eye lower by a razor to the Romanian eye fetishist Victor Brauner to the early Ernst Wilhelm Nays, the gooey eyeball was all the time current as a relentless reminder of the autumn of imaginative and prescient. However, Rama makes use of the naturally animated picture component in a totally completely different approach. She both lets a single eye stare out of a canvas vast open and with out lids or sprinkles a form of eye caviar made up of many small eyeballs into the streaks of paint and lakes of glue in her photos. The ensuing polyfocal view from the image onto the viewer is deeply unsettling – a thousand eyes stare at us, from all kinds of angles and thru all phases of this fascinating work.

Carol Rama. Rebellin der Moderne. Schirn Frankfurt; till February 2, 2025. The catalog prices 32 euros.