Collection: Carla Accardi

Carla Accardi (Trapani, 1924 – Rome, 2014) was a leading figure in abstract art in Italy and one of the first women to establish herself with authority on the post-World War II international art scene. Her coherent and radical research spanned more than six decades, evolving from a black-and-white, sign-based painting toward chromatic, linguistic, and material experimentation that left a profound mark on the history of contemporary art.

Having trained in Palermo, Florence, and finally Rome, Accardi moved to the capital in 1946, where she met and married Antonio Sanfilippo, a painter also originally from Sicily. The following year, she co-founded the Forma 1 group, along with Turcato, Consagra, Dorazio, Perilli, and Guerrini: a collective that theorized an abstract and Marxist art, in stark contrast to the neorealism dominant at the time. For Accardi, her ideological commitment immediately merged with an intense exploration of the sign as an autonomous structure of visual language.

In the 1950s and 1960s, Accardi developed a pictorial vocabulary in which recurring, dynamic marks inhabit monochrome surfaces, often vibrant with chromatic contrasts. The work becomes gesture and writing, drawing on a unique pictorial experience rooted both in Mediterranean memory and the urban present. During this phase, Accardi exhibited regularly in Italy and Europe, becoming a point of reference for abstract and informal research.

The true turning point came in the late 1960s, when she introduced the use of sicofoil into her artistic practice, a transparent and flexible plastic material that allowed her to create lightweight, dematerialized environmental works. Her Tende (Tents), installations made of colored sheets and white marks, are among her most iconic works and represent a decisive opening toward space, perception, and viewer participation. It was in this context that Accardi also became a central figure in Italian feminism: in 1970, together with Carla Lonzi and Elvira Banotti, she founded the group Rivolta Femminile, affirming the need for autonomous female identity even in the artistic field.

From the 1980s onward, Accardi alternated large-scale works on raw canvas with returns to paper and plastic, maintaining an ongoing dialogue with art history, the avant-garde, and contemporary art. In the 1990s in particular, her work reached stylistic maturity, enriched by reflections on lines, transparency, light, and pictorial space. Her poetics, characterized by formal coherence and intellectual tension, has influenced entire generations of Italian and international artists.

She has exhibited at numerous Venice Biennials (1948, 1964, 1976, 1978, 1988, 1993), at MoMA PS1 in New York (2001), at the Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, at MACRO in Rome, and has been included in exhibitions such as Wack! Art and the Feminist Revolution and Women in Abstraction. Her works are part of the collections of major Italian and international museums, including MoMA in New York, the Tate Modern in London, the Centre Pompidou in Paris, the Museo del Novecento in Milan, the MAXXI and the GNAM in Rome.

In the final years of her life, Carla Accardi received numerous public awards, including the President of the Republic Award for her artistic career. Her figure, bridging rigor and poetry, form and thought, remains central to understanding the relationship between abstract art, female consciousness, and visual experimentation.