Carla Accardi Italian, 1924-2014

Overview

Carla Accardi, one of the key figures of the abstract art movement in Italy during the second half of the twentieth century, was described by the esteemed New York Times art critic Roberta Smith as an "art star on the order of Agnes Martin in Italy." In the 1980's Accardi shifted her focus away from innovative clear plastics and back to canvas, employing signs (fictional abstracted calligraphic marks repeated to convey multiple dualities) and chromatic juxtapositions. In this decade her palette range expanded and intensified. The combination of these colorful surfaces and the endless array of abstract images result in dynamic pictorializations as evidenced in our example with its grill-like patterns and figure/ground reversals. Although Accardi's works have been celebrated primarily in Europe, recently American audiences have come to embrace her dynamic and changing works.