Hauser & Wirth, one of the biggest galleries in the world, has added yet one more artist to its roster: Carol Rama, whose estate Hauser & Wirth will represent alongside the Berlin-based Galerie Isabella Bortolozzi.
Rama was one of the most celebrated artists of the 20th century. Working in Italy, she produced paintings about female sexuality that belonged to a style all her own. Often featuring bulging eyes and women with their tongues sticking out, these paintings do not cleanly conform to the tendencies of any artistic movement, making the self-taught artist a particularly fascinating figure within recent Italian art history.
Rama was known well before the dawn of the 21st century, and even won Venice Biennale’s Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement in 2003. But her art remained relatively obscure outside Italy until the past decade.
A 2014 retrospective staged at the Museu d’Art Contemporani di Barcelona was followed by another at Paris’s Musée d’Art Moderne in 2015, the year of her death at age 97; yet another appeared at the New Museum in New York in 2017. In 2022, she made her second Venice Biennale appearance, figuring in the show alongside many younger female artists who conjure worlds beyond our own.
“Self-taught, fiercely independent and utterly untamed, Rama was a pioneer—she was unafraid to be as visceral and autobiographical as others were studied and protracted,” said Hauser & Wirth cofounder Manuela Wirth in a statement, noting that her mother, Ursula Hauser, was a “longtime champion” of Rama.
Hauser & Wirth’s first Rama exhibition will be staged in New York in May. Her estate previously showed in the city with Fergus McCaffrey and the now-defunct Lévy Gorvy (whose founders currently run another New York gallery called LGD).
The Rama estate is the second addition to Hauser & Wirth’s roster in 2026 alone. Earlier this year, the gallery also took on Conny Maier, a German painter whom Hauser & Wirth now represents alongside the Berlin-based Société gallery.
Carol Rama, Ostentazione (Ostentation), 2002.
Photo Jon Etter/Courtesy Archivio Carol Rama, Torino and the Ursula Hauser Collection, Switzerland
