This dense, absorbing, sometimes shocking exhibition marks the first major U.S. museum survey of the work of a relatively obscure but self-evidently important Italian artist, who died in Turin, Italy, a couple of years ago at the age of 103. Carol Rama was self-taught and a consistent outsider to contemporary trends and events—political as well as creative—but the passage of time has proven her vision more than simply eccentric. Focusing on the human body in all its beauty and grotesquerie, Rama anticipated the ongoing debates around the representation of sexuality and sickness, producing a cross-disciplinary oeuvre of rare power.
Tracing Rama’s iconoclastic career across 50-plus years, curators Helga Christoffersen and Massimiliano Gioni introduce New York audiences to her often-tortured images of flesh in extremis, reveling in their corporeal and symbolic impact. Rama combines the erotic, the mystical and the quasi-surgical in a style that intersects with artists such as Hans Bellmer and Lee Bontecou, but which goes further than either of them. From the wild imaginings of her early watercolors to her formal experiments with latex and other materials in the ’60s and on to her late figurative work, the vision revealed in this show will haunt your dreams.