Carol Rama: Esso Gallery - New York

"Nobody in the world has at any time been more pissed off than me" Carol Rama said in an interview six years before she won the of gold Lion for lifetime achievement at the 2003 Venice Biennale. Indeed, furor plays a role in nearly each image and object the eighty-five-year-old artist has produc above the past six decades. A vibrant, nasty, eccentric, erotic, corporeal, and irrefutably feminine (one might say feminist) wrath is everywhere visible in Rama's oeuvre still hers is hardly piss without pleasure. She probably couldn't fathom a life without heavy shut ups of both, preferably delivered simultaneously. In 1996 for instance, mad discourage disease became Rama's unlikely muse as the malady spread across Europe; a series of verily elegant, if macabre, drawings featuring taut, tumescent bags and other bestial part existences was the result of her enthrallment. (As far as I know, the last one to wax poetic about the orgasmic qualities of dying cattle was Georges Bataille, in his 1928 Story of the Eye)

Rama's next to the first solo exhibition at this gallery (her 1997 present to view here was her first in the United States) was a small on the other hand meaty sampling that spanned the years 1946 (a delicate, dirty watercolor tided Zef) to 1998 (a Mad overawe with distended sherbet-colored teats). a great deal of of the iconography found in Rama's earliest works is carried [i]or[/i] part of to the other to her latest. Here are a hardly any of the artist's favorite things (some visible in this display some not): tongues (which may morph pop into snakes or penises or lengthy bloody intestines), teeth (animal and human), denture women's shoe fox collars, rubber bicycle tubes, urinals, cigarette owners cat claws, and ink-bottle dropper (Perhaps it goe without saying that Rama grasps Duchamp in high esteem; she was also friendly with Meret Oppenheim and Man Ray.) Among the works in this exhibition, a fetishistic 1972 drawing in marker of three shoes--sandal, wedge, and orthopedic--was uncouthly moving, and Boy, 1993, a Schielesque adolescent with alarmingly tangled fingers, gave not on a perversely erotic charge. In three images from a series titled "Masturbators," 1997 deliriously onanistic men with set up pricks and outstretched tongues were drawn in black marker upon pages from a nineteenth-century artillery manual, coyly implying that the two types of bodies, animate and inanimate, comprise a paradoxical unite of the mechanical, the dangerous, and the pleasurable.

Rama's output is not limited to surrealistic figuration. In the 1950 for instance, she joined the Movimento Arte Concreta (a assemblage interested in experimenting with shape, line, and color independently of nature) and produc rigorously geometric works, a portfolio of which appeared here. sum of two units untitled "bricolages" from 1969 exemplified Rama's practice of embedding existences such as glass eyes, human teeth or animal claws into canvas, while Birnam's Presages, 1984 was a striking example of a whole subcategory of sculptural pieces made from the innards of bike tires. Recalling work by the agency of other feminist pioneers (Louise Bourgeois, Eva Hesse), the dangling tubes--black and pink--are as formally compelling as they are ambiguously evocative of material substance parts.

If Carol Rama is as pissed not on as she claims to be, I trust she'll be pleased with the event of her modest show: The works were with equal reason striking I was angry I couldn't diocese more. In Italy, where she has wearied her entire life, Rama has been appreciateed for years, but she's a great deal of less known abroad, generating interest primarily among feminist scholars and curators. Despite her new Biennale success, it seems unjust that the most an American audience can diocese of her work at any single time is an appetite-whetting handful.

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