mass death. After more than thirty years concocting virulent strains of abstraction, Rama returned to figuration. in 1979, her perversions of the 1930s and 1940s, previously censored by the authorities, were finally seen for the first time in an exhibition of a dozen early watercolors at Galleria Matano in Turin. 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. Her studio Heavy black curtains were drawn over her windows. She stated: "Black is the color that will help me to die. I'd like to paint everything black, it's a kind of incineration, a kind of wonderful agony..." The apartment's ceilings are high and dark. Charcoal gray and stale beige walls work with the dark wood floors, doors, furniture, and artifacts to further shade the rooms. 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. On one set day a week, she used to open up her workshop abode to friends and intellectuals. Part Museum, part asylum, part apothecary, part reliquary, part anthropological archive: her home overflows with small sculptures, talismans, relics, masks, exotic figurines, dolls, miniature charms, unusual tchotchkes, artifacts, shoes and shoe molds, vessels, glass bottles of perfume, strands of beads, pieces of jewelry she made, hanging ornaments, exhibition posters, etchings, paintings, and pictures everywhere. Boxes, crates, drawers, and shelves are crammed full of strips of rubber, tape measures, hammers, scissors, brushes, markers, pencil nubs, watercolor cakes, pastels, vials of pigment, jars of ink and Flashe paint. Seemingly random objects take on an allegorical charge, mirroring aspects of her personality. Notable works Nonna Carolina [Granny Carolina] (1936). Thought to be her earliest watercolor, the old woman's withered bust lies limply among so many prosthetic limbs and wooden shoe forms, her throat besieged by a half dozen black leeches like a soggy swamp monster, displaying her wetness as a necklace. Melodramma [Melodrama] (1960). Features a bubbling, festering, charred tumor of texture stretched across the middle, surrounded by a handful of