Following the end of World War II, there was a vigorous international turn among artists to abstraction. Creating a counter-position to fascist art’s realist aesthetics, a non-objective art employing an abstract-geometric visual language likewise gained significance in Italy. The group Movimento Arte Concreta (MAC) founded in Milan in 1948, also had a branch in Turin based around the artist and critic Albino Galvano, who was a friend of Carol Rama. Rama joined MAC in 1953 and said of this unusual step: “I wanted to become part of a system, a spiritual order. When I joined MAC in the 1950s, I felt I had to wean myself off the excessive freedom which I had been criticised for.”

It was during this period that Rama was able to find a clear, abstract formal language. Questions of composition and order – form, colour and surface – became the priority. In the painting La linea di sete (The Dry Period) from 1954, rhythmically rising black structures stand out almost musically from a pale background in tones of grey, yellow and ochre which were typical of her work in this period. At the same time, Rama began to experiment with different media. In addition to works on paper and canvas, she produced works made of synthetic fur and fabric, such as La pelliccia (The Fur) and Untitled from 1954 and 1959.