Iwan Wirth, Manuela Wirth and Marc Payot, Presidents of Hauser & Wirth, announced today that the gallery will represent the Estate of Carol Rama alongside Galerie Isabella Bortolozzi, Berlin.

Over more than seven decades, Carol Rama (b. 1918, Turin; d. 2015) developed a radical body of work that addressed connections between desire, sacrifice, eroticism and repression. By constructing a visual cosmos where transgression leads to liberation, Rama countered assumptions about gender, sexuality and representation, offering a retort to the societal conventions and the prevailing far-right political ideologies that defined the fascist-dominated Italy of her youth. She set neither boundaries nor hierarchies between painting, drawing, sculpture and printmaking, pulling all of these mediums into her image universe. ‘My self-assurance exists only across from a sheet of paper that needs to be filled in,’ Rama once declared. ‘Work is the only way to drive off my fears. My rebellion consists of painting.’

Today, Rama is considered one of the most original and individualistic artists to emerge from the 20th Century. Yet while she exhibited regularly in Italy, her work was largely absent from international contemporary discourse until the late 1990s when it finally attracted interest among a new generation of artists, curators and critics. Rama’s art has since galvanized ever-expanding attention and avid scholarship. She was awarded the Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement at the Venice Biennale in 2003 and major solo exhibitions of her work have been presented at the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam (1998); MACBA, Barcelona (2014); Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris, Paris (2015); New Museum, New York City (2017); and Schirn Kunsthalle, Frankfurt (2024), among others.

Carol Rama’s first solo exhibition with Hauser & Wirth will open in May 2026 in New York.

photo: Pino Dell’Aquila