Carol Rama was born in Turin, Italy, in 1918. A self-taught artist, Rama refused adherence to any one specific style, method, or group during her seven-decade career. Beginning in the 1930s, Rama began to create an aesthetic vocabulary filled with icons that were linked to issues of real-life mental illness, financial ruin, and suicide, woven together with a mythologized biography. When her first exhibition was censored in 1945 for erotic and sexually explicit works, some of which featured women with wagging tongues and excreting snakes and acts of bestiality, Rama took a hiatus from figurative motifs and became involved with the Concrete Art Movement (MAC) until the mid-1950s.

In the early 1960s, Rama created the series Bricolages, ...