I choose these things, prostheses, false teeth, shaving brushes, razors, urinals because they are what I like the most, they are victims of what they are, they have no chance of changing.
— Carol Rama

Philosopher and curator Beatriz Preciado describes the art historical relevance of Carol Rama’s oeuvre as a conspicuous absence: “Amputated from history in 1945, the work of Rama would return later—insistent and harrowing, like a phantom limb.” The historical severance to which she refers is the censorship inflicted on the artist’s first solo show at the Faber Gallery in Turin, when Italy’s fascist government shut down the exhibition of 27 watercolors, all signed with the artist’s full name “Olga Carolina Rama.” The watercolors that had been deemed too lewd for public consumption were figural, art-brut renderings of naked men and women in sexually explicit poses; the images of women masturbating were singularly obscene. Long before the second-wave feminists would assert the existence and importance of female sexuality and the feminine gaze, Rama was unabashedly creating delicate yet poignantly affectionate images from a highly sexual and insistently feminine perspective. The artist had never received any formal training during her bourgeois upbringing, and accordingly these early watercolors are imbued with the budding artist’s raw energy and youthful boldness. Despite this early censorship, Rama continued to create new work but decided to abandon figuration and engage in the burgeoning arena of abstraction that was already dominant in the major metropolises of Italy. She quickly became involved in the Concrete Art Movement (MAC) via her friendship with artist Felice Casorati, and it was with this embrace of abstraction that the artist began signing her works “Carol Rama.”