‘In Visita | Carol Rama’: Pistoia welcomes the Turin artist after more than 60 years — 7 works from the 1950s–1970s

As Florence Daily News reports, the exhibition ‘In Visita | Carol Rama’ opened on October 3 at Palazzo de’ Rossi in Pistoia, about 35 kilometres northwest of Florence, and will remain open until February 14, 2027. The exhibition, the fifth of the ‘In Visita’ project of Fondazione Pistoia Musei in collaboration with Fondazione Caript, presents seven works created from the early 1950s to the mid-1970s — six of them from the collections of Gallerie d’Italia – Intesa Sanpaolo and one from a private collection. The curators are Monica Preti, the foundation’s general director, and Annamaria Iacuzzi, curator of the 20th-century collections.

For the artist born in Turin in 1918, this is a return to Pistoia after more than six decades: in 1965, in the Sala Ghibellina of Palazzo Comunale, her first solo exhibition organised by a public museum was held. One of the works from that exhibition, ‘Senza titolo (Bricolage R 4)’ from 1964, now returns to the city on loan from a private collection. An important role in the 1965 event was played by the writer and intellectual Edoardo Sanguineti, who had followed Rama’s artistic research in the preceding years and called her 1960s experiments ‘Bricolages’.

The exhibited works trace about two decades of changes in the artist’s materials and visual language: from experiments with abstraction in the Turin branch of Movimento Arte Concreta in the 1950s (‘Senza titolo’, 1952; ‘Composizione 71’, 1955), to unusual materials and everyday objects in the 1960s, through to the 1970s compositions with bicycle inner tubes (‘Luogo e segni’, ‘Smentire il bianco’) and thread sewn into fabric, known as her ‘diagrams’.

The exhibition is accompanied by a programme of talks and guided visits: a discussion on Rama’s work at Palazzo Fabroni on October 24, a meeting on November 14 dedicated to her Turin home, where she lived and worked for more than 70 years, and an event on January 30, 2027 on the role of the sign in the work of Rama and Maria Lai. The curators will lead visits on November 8, January 16 and February 14 (the last with the artist Zoë Gruni), while the publisher Gli Ori has published a 144-page bilingual book with texts by Monica Preti, Maria Grazia Messina and Annamaria Iacuzzi.