‘Against The Day: Chakaia Booker & Carol Rama’
Galerie Isabella Bortolozzi, Berlin
Until March 25, 2023
The body, materiality, and intuition take center stage in this striking juxtaposition of two artists: Chakaia Booker, a Black American sculptor of monumental works predominately composed of recycled tires, and the deceased Carol Rama, a self-taught Italian painter of sensual works addressing female identity.
The pleasure of viewing these sculptures, paintings, and photographs in dialogue comes from each woman’s approach to the capacity of the (female) body. Booker’s abstract sculptures result from enormous physical effort. Since the early 1990s, she has instinctively slashed, woven, and contorted her industrial material. In Rama’s work, the body appears as a visceral figure, experiencing acts of eroticism or violence and responding to it with defiance. In bringing these two artists together, gallerist Isabella Bortolozzi does not seek comparison; rather, she hopes to see ‘if these communicating bodies would generate something new from the encounter.’ A.R.
