Carla Accardi

Carla Accardi (1924-2014) was one of the key figures of the abstract art movement in Italy during the second half of the twentieth century, described by the New York Times critic Roberta Smith as "an art star on the order of Agnes Martin in Italy." Born in Trapani, Sicily, she moved to Rome and studied at the Academy of Fine Arts, aligning herself with the emerging generation of artists who would reshape Italian art after the Second World War. In 1947, she became a founding member of the Forma 1 group alongside Pietro Consagra, Piero Dorazio, Antonio Sanfilippo, and others, a collective that declared itself both formalist and Marxist and helped bring abstraction into the mainstream of Italian art.

Accardi developed a distinctive vocabulary built around signs, fictional abstracted calligraphic marks repeated to convey multiple dualities and set against chromatic juxtapositions. Beginning in the 1960s, she experimented with unconventional supports, including her celebrated works on sicofoil, a transparent plastic that allowed her marks to float in luminous space. In the 1980s she shifted her focus back to canvas, and her palette in this decade expanded and intensified significantly. The combination of these colorful surfaces with her endless array of abstract images produces the kind of dynamic pictorializations seen in grill-like patterns and figure-ground reversals that define her mature work.

Accardi represented Italy at the Venice Biennale and received major recognition throughout her career. Her work has long been celebrated in Europe, and in recent years American audiences have come to embrace her dynamic and continually evolving practice.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.