Carol Rama’s work from the early 1970s onwards was informed by austere, almost minimalist compositions. The largest and most diverse series within the Gomme (Tyres) group of works is entitled Spazio anche più che tempo (Space even more than Time). Rama mounted cut-up bicycle and car tyre inner-tubes on canvas. Form, space and time provide the subject matter, order and rigor the compositional principle. Rama nevertheless succeeded in transgressing the rigidity imposed by Minimalism, combining the rubber’s materiality with allusions to the corporeal and erotic: “I used this material because it represents the colour of skin, it was flesh, for sensual touching, it was erotic!”

In the industrial city of Turin, the car metropolis dominated by Fiat, used and discarded rubber was readily available, typically in differing colours. Serial numbers can still be read on some of the rubber strips flattened with a roller. Rama also associated rubber with her biography: “Tyres have provided me with a lot of joy. Tyres remind me of my father, the factory, they remind me of power.” Rama’s Gomme are complex, ambivalent and informed by an intense physical presence. Private and public subjects likewise mingle in this group of works. The title of the series La guerra è astratta (War is Abstract) is borrowed from the poem Death to Van Gogh's Ear by Allen Ginsberg from 1957, where he writes: “War is abstract / the world will be destroyed / but I will die only for poetry, that will save the world”.