Carol Rama: Esso Gallery

Burton, Johanna, Artforum International

"Nobody in the world has ever been more pissed off than me," Carol Rama said in an interview six years before she won the Golden Lion for lifetime achievement at the 2003 Venice Biennale. Indeed, fury plays a role in nearly every image and object the eighty-five-year-old artist has produced over 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, yet hers is hardly piss without pleasure. She probably couldn't fathom a life without heavy closes of both, preferably delivered simultaneously. In 1996, for instance, mad cow disease became Rama's unlikely muse as the malady spread …

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Publication information: Article title: Carol Rama: Esso Gallery. Contributors: Burton, Johanna - Author. Magazine title: Artforum International. Volume: 42. Issue: 3 Publication date: November 2003. Page number: 191. © 1999 Artforum International Magazine, Inc. COPYRIGHT 2003 Gale Group.

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