Like many artists in this exhibition, Rama gained acclaim only late in her career. A self-taught artist, today she is celebrated for her biographically inflected work, which mines themes of poverty, trauma, and female sexuality. This work is part of a series known as Bricolages, in which she covered abstract, stain-like grounds with found and often fetishistic objects, including eyelashes, teeth, syringes, or, in this case, plastic doll eyes. In earlier years, Rama focused on erotic representations of women, but after she was censored for obscenity in fascist Italy in 1945, she moved away from figuration and entered what she called the "abstract war."
Gallery label from Making Space: Women Artists and Postwar Abstraction, April 19 - August 13, 2017.
