[2] Her work was relatively little known until curator Lea Vergine included several pieces in a 1980 exhibition, prompting Rama to revisit her earlier watercolour style.

Infused with inwardness, watercolour has an intimate relation to the painter's body, with brushwork that tends to revolve around hand and wrist action, much like writing; its scale suited Rama's tabletop home-studio set-up.

A medium of dilution and pollution, bleeding and spillage, watercolour was just the right thing for the then-young artist fascinated by bodies, orifices, fluids, and their intersubjective exchange.

Colour in her early watercolours is generally applied sparingly, in pale washes or barely at all, with strategic, vivid punctuations that draws attention to key erogenous zones: mouths, tongues, nipples, cunts, dicks, and assholes- wet holes and erotic plumbing primed for liquid flow.

[4] At the end of the thirties, Carol Rama also painted some twenty oils on canvas with a less scabrous content, as if her message had been influenced by the more conventional medium.

Chronically excessive and too much for the scene to handle, Rama could continue to fall outside authorized spheres of visibility and slip through cracks between official categories.

Rama's oversexed, vulgar, dirty, and disfigured bodies roiled propriety and uptight norms, directly challenging the far-right national politics of the day.

By the early 1950s, she was painting irregular geometric compositions of lilting rhomboids and squares, often connected by long spidery lines or forming a directional field of implied movement.

Books on her shelf from that time confirm formal affinities with Klee and Kandinsky as well as the influence of Cubism, especially Picasso, whose major exhibition in Milan in 1953 sent ripples across the Italian scene.

She cut them up, splayed them out flat, hung them dangling off painting, and draped them limply over sculptural structures, flaccid bunches of long, hollow piping.

The tyres, ranging in colour from black to rich rusty ocher, would always be associated with memories of her dead father and his factory, but formally they also echo the crowded multiplicity of dicks and snakes in her early watercolours, as well as more general signifiers of mobility, circulation, plumbing, and detumescence.

Amid her return to figurative picture-making, which lasted until her death in 2015 at age 97, Rama became fascinated with the mad cow outbreak [Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy] that spiralled into a global media frenzy in the late nineties.

She made a series of collaged paintings called La Mucca Pazza [The Mad Cow], dominated by bloated udder shapes cut out of leather and rubber and arranged on used mail sacks.

Dwelling is this apartment at Via Napione 15 in Turin for over seventy years, Rama's studio home became an extension of herself, her persona, and her singular artistic visions.

Boxes, crates, drawers, and shelves are crammed full of strips of rubber, tape measures, hammers, scissors, brushes, markers, pencil nubs, watercolour cakes, pastels, vials of pigment, jars of ink and Flashe paint.