Carol Rama’s unconventional painting encompassed an erotic, and often sexually aggressive universe populated by characters who present themes of sexual identity with specific references to female sensuality.
She deals with a lot about sexual fantasies and fetishes, which is incredibly helpful for my current work about sexting and eating on camera.
Her work from “Antibodies” is especially interesting. The work seen together present a rare opportunity to examine the ways in which Rama’s fantastical anatomies opposed the political ideology of her time and continue to speak to ideas of desire, sacrifice, repression, and liberation. “Carol Rama: Antibodies” celebrates the independence and eccentricity of this legendary artist whose work spanned half a century of contemporary art history and anticipated debates on sexuality, gender, and representation. Encompassing her entire career, the exhibition (in New York a few years ago) traces the development from her early erotic, harrowing depictions of “bodies without organs” through later works that invoke innards, fluids, and limbs—a miniature theatre of cruelty in which metaphors of contagion and madness counteract every accepted norm.
saratrouble 