Carol Rama

Hedonistic, erotic and unsettling: on Carol Rama's late drawings and watercolors

Self-taught Italian painter Carol Rama (1918-2015) worked in relative obscurity for decades, until curator Lea Vergine included her in a 1980 exhibition that instigated her discovery by the art world. In 2003 she was awarded the Golden Lion at the Venice Biennale for her life's work; retrospectives at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam and the New Museum in New York soon followed.
This hardcover volume focuses on the drawings and watercolors that Rama produced from the mid-1990s until her death. These include the Cadeau series, which depict scribbled orifices multiplied down the page, or red swollen hooves; Tongues, from the late 1990s, which depict bright-red horned tongues wagging their way across the page; and works from the early 2000s that feature thornlike breasts rendered in marker, nail polish and other materials on found sheets of paper.