Carol Rama's Defiant Bodies: Antibodies Exhibition at New Museum Explores Six Decades of Transgressive Work

From April 26 to September 10, 2017, the New Museum in New York presented 'Carol Rama: Antibodies,' a major exhibition surveying the Italian artist's provocative six-decade career. The show opened with early watercolors featuring defiant, often disabled female figures—women in wheelchairs or strapped to asylum beds wearing elegant high heels—that challenged notions of bodily perfection. These works reflected the anguish stemming from her parents' mental illness, yet conveyed exuberant joy. Rama's production proved remarkably diverse, spanning geometric abstraction in the 1950s as part of Italy's Arte Concreta movement, expressionist etchings, bronze sculpture, collage, and assemblage using materials like sliced bicycle tires. She later shifted to Informalist-style works in the 1960s, returned to abstract composition in the 1970s, and explored Surrealist figuration in the 1980s with paintings over maps or architectural elevations. Her final years included large-scale male nudes and collages. The exhibition design at 235 Bowery flowed continuously from recent works back through earlier decades, interspersed with the artist's irreverent quotes that provided context. Rama's work consistently subverted expectations, from disembodied mouths and eroticized body parts to images blending gallows humor with vitality, maintaining her singular vision until her death in 2006 without conforming to neat chronological progression or movements like the Italian Transavanguardia.