handle, Rama could continue to fall outside authorized spheres of visibility and slip through cracks between official categories. Throughout her long life in art, she fluently navigated along the margins and shifted positions across movements as a rogue agent, while consistently affirming her presence: she exhibited regularly for over half a century, presenting solo shows nearly every year, mostly in northern Italy, with rare breaks of more than a few years. 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 rhomboid 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. Within the decade, her abstraction evolved into more painterly, impastoed, gestural canvases streaked with dark, textured forms that read as wounds or scars. An example of this would be a black monochrome she painted called Melodramma (1960). Around the mid fifties, Rama began to undo little by little the geometric conventions of the concrete art. Movement while also experimenting with new materials and techniques. Carol Rama invents organic abstraction, surrealism, concrete visceral art and porno brut. Carol Rama was profoundly influenced throughout the sixties by the experimental linguistic and visual poetry movement of Novissimi. Many of the writers of this movement reclaimed the "feminine" gaze as a tool for critiquing the dominant ideology, the scene was paradoxically male. Starting in 1970, Rama began incorporating bicycle inner tubes into her work. 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 tires, ranging in color 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 watercolors, as well as more general signifiers of mobility, circulation, plumbing, and detumescence. With titles like Le Guerra e astratta [War is Abstract], Arsenale [Arsenal], and Presagi di Birnam [Omens of Birnam], Rama's rubber collages and assemblages are framed in relation to martial power, rubble, mass weaponry, and