Carol Rama / Rick Owens – Dialogues

Comunicato stampa

VOENA is pleased to announce our upcoming exhibition in Milan, opening 18 September, showcasing the work of two pioneers of art and design: Carol Rama and Rick Owens - a concept conceived by Marco Frignati. Rama's visceral works will be displayed alongside the sculptural furniture of Rick Owens, selected and staged by Michèle Lamy, a meeting of radical originals where painting and object circle the same charged ground: eros, the body, and decay.

Entirely self-taught, Rama began with the erotic watercolours of her Appassionata series, with its prostheses and unbound bodies, a subject so honest that her first exhibition, in Turin in 1945, was censored before it opened. She later turned to the bricolage for which she is now celebrated: assemblages of doll's eyes, taxidermy, syringes, electrical wire and ephemera. Recognition came late but emphatically, with the Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement at the 2003 Venice Biennale, followed by the major touring retrospective The Passion According to Carol Rama. The exhibition brings together works from across her seven-decade career.

Since founding his furniture atelier in 2007, Owens has extended the vocabulary and deeply-held aesthetics of his renowned fashion house into the lived environment, in close collaboration with Lamy, the primary creative force behind the atelier's handmade, sculptural language. The uncompromising surfaces of his pieces use bone and hide, plywood, alabaster and bronze to produce an elegant brutality, one that melds with the subject and material of Rama's works: in the 1970s she began cutting strips from bicycle tyres, worn rubber standing in for flesh, just as Owens uses hide, bone and rubber as surrogates for the body.

This is the second exhibition of Owens' work staged by VOENA, following a 2014 exhibition organised by Marco Voena during Milan Design Week, showcasing the Owens' designs alongside a selection of Post-War Italian artworks. The Voena family has a historical relationship with Rama and her family, and have themselves been long term collectors of her work.

Owens is an admirer and collector of Rama's work, and this exhibition unites the two for the first time since 2015, when his furniture accompanied her exhibition at the Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris. Recast in the intimate atmosphere of VOENA's Milan gallery, the dialogue of rubber and hide, bone and prosthesis collapses the distance between art and design, and proposes that these two visionaries, both driven by transgression rather than technique, arrived at resonant conclusions by independent but convergent routes.