During the 1980s, Carol Rama returned to figuration during a period when the Transavanguardia movement was emerging in Italy, represented by such painters as Francesco Clemente. These artists were once again exploring traditional media and motifs as panel painting and figures adapted from ancient mythology. These tendencies became likewise visible in Rama’s work, even if she continued using the techniques of Bricolage and objets trouvés. She employed floor plans and maps of Turin as well as construction drawings as her image supports. The works featured figures from her early watercolours: nymphs with their heads wreathed in flowers, gorgons with wings and snakes that look at us head-on, sticking out their tongues with relish.

The assertion by some critics that Rama’s figurative works are spontaneous, naive art – free of historical and cultural references – is too simplistic and testifies to a marginalization of her work. Their sexual connotations cannot distract from the fact that the iconography and style make references to antiquity, adapted from the erotic scenes of ancient paintings and vessels which were of a sacred and ritual nature. Likewise Rama’s late work demonstrates that she felt just as attracted and inspired by the interior of a pissoir as she did by the interior of a church.

In 1980, Rama’s work was presented in the ground-breaking group exhibition L’altra metà dell’avanguardia 1910–1940 (The Other Side of the Avant-Garde 1910–1940), curated by Lea Vergine at Palazzo Reale in Milan. This was the first European exhibition to reveal the contribution by female artists to the avant-garde, resulting in Rama’s work receiving new attention and significance.

Already some years earlier, still in the 1970s, Rama had met the gallery owner Luciano Anselmino, who was already representing Man Ray and Andy Warhol at his Galleria Il Fauno in Turin – and was soon to also represent Rama. During these years she travelled frequently accompanied by Man Ray and met, among others, the galerist Alexander Iolas. The portraits of Man Ray and Iolas that Rama produced in 1984 are just two of the numerous works testifying to her network.