Carol Rama’s childhood in 1920s Turin was shaped by factory life. Her father, Amabile, was a small-scale manufacturer of bicycles and automobiles, and Rama played in its corridors at Via Digione 17. When she was a teen, bankruptcy shook the foundations of Rama’s world—her mother, Martha, was committed to a psychiatric hospital, and six years later Amabile committed suicide. Rama enrolled in art school but soon left. She wanted freedom to pursue her erotic watercolors in peace. Despite public outrage, censorship, and closed exhibitions, she continued to create crude depictions of bodies, sex, bestiality. Rama died in 2015, age 97. This is the first large-scale retrospective of her work in Germany. —Elena Clavarino