ACCARDI Carla

Carla Accardi (Trapani, 1924 – Rome, 2014) was one of the leading figures of Italian abstraction in the second half of the twentieth century. A founder of the Forma 1 Group, she developed an original pictorial language built through marks, rhythms, and chromatic relationships. From the black-and-white compositions of the 1950s to works in vivid colors and, eventually, experiments with transparent materials, her practice continually challenged the traditional boundaries of painting. Carla Accardi’s artworks do not depict recognizable objects or landscapes; rather, they create an autonomous visual space in which forms seem to move and transform. Her contribution to contemporary art lies precisely in her ability to renew abstract language without sacrificing an immediately recognizable artistic identity.

Carla Accardi: biography and artistic training

Carla Accardi was born in Trapani on October 9, 1924. After studying the classics, she became interested in painting and attended the Academy of Fine Arts in Palermo, later continuing her studies in Florence.

Her youth coincided with the years of the Second World War and the difficult period of postwar reconstruction. For many young Italian artists, the postwar period was also an opportunity to fundamentally rethink the meaning of art and its relationship with the European avant-gardes.

In 1946, Accardi moved to Rome with the painter Antonio Sanfilippo, whom she married in 1949. In the capital, she came into contact with artists and intellectuals interested in moving beyond traditional figurative models and creating a new visual language.

Rome became the center of her activity and the place where a practice destined to evolve over more than sixty years took shape.

From the outset, Accardi showed a particular interest in the autonomy of painting. Her aim was not to faithfully reproduce reality, but to explore the expressive possibilities of forms, marks, and colors.

This choice marked the starting point of a journey in which experimentation would never cease, while maintaining a strong stylistic continuity.

The Forma 1 Group and Italian abstraction

In 1947, Carla Accardi took part in founding the Forma 1 Group alongside Ugo Attardi, Pietro Consagra, Piero Dorazio, Mino Guerrini, Achille Perilli, Antonio Sanfilippo, and Giulio Turcato.

The group emerged at a particularly intense moment in Italian art debates, marked by the contrast between figurative painting, often associated with social realism, and new abstract explorations.

The artists of Forma 1 advocated the need for an autonomous artistic language in which lines, colors, and forms could have expressive value independent of the depiction of recognizable subjects.

Their manifesto asserted a formalist position, engaging with the political and cultural ideas of the postwar period while opposing the subordination of art to an illustrative function.

Accardi was the only woman among the manifesto’s signatories. Her participation was a pivotal moment in her artistic development and marked the beginning of a journey that would make her a central figure in European abstraction.

In 1948, she took part in the Venice Biennale for the first time, beginning a relationship with one of the leading international contemporary art events.

The experience of Forma 1 helped shape her conviction that painting could create an autonomous reality, based on the relationships between the elements of a composition.

Carla Accardi’s marks: painting as language

One of the most recognizable aspects of Carla Accardi’s artworks is her use of marks.

Her compositions feature forms that may resemble letters, symbols, or fragments of an unknown script. However, these are not characters belonging to an alphabet to be deciphered.

Accardi’s marks are not meant to communicate specific words or messages: their meaning arises from how they are arranged on the surface, repeated, interwoven, and transformed.

During the 1950s, the artist developed a style of painting characterized above all by the contrast between black and white.

The compositions from this period feature complex structures in which the marks seem to emerge from the background and then merge with it again. The eye follows the forms without necessarily finding a starting point or a definite direction.

The painted surface becomes a space crossed by movement and tension.

These works show affinities with certain developments in Art Informel, but Accardi retains her own identity, based on the continuity of the mark and the rhythmic organization of the composition.

The French critic Michel Tapié took an interest in her work, helping to bring it into the international art debate.

Accardi’s painting is therefore not merely a decorative exercise. Through the repetition and transformation of marks, the artist creates a language capable of evoking sensations of movement, balance, and instability.

Color in Carla Accardi’s artworks

At the beginning of the 1960s, color once again took on a central role in Carla Accardi’s work.

After her largely monochromatic compositions, the artist introduced increasingly intense color combinations, profoundly changing how her marks were perceived.

Pink, reds, greens, blues, and other vivid shades interact through contrasts and overlaps, giving the works new visual energy.

Color is not used to describe objects or settings. It becomes one of the elements through which the composition itself takes shape.

A mark may appear light or incisive, near or distant, depending on the shade surrounding it and its relationship with the other elements.

In works from this period, the painterly rhythm often takes on an almost musical character. The forms seem to alternate like sequences, creating intervals, accelerations, and pauses.

Accardi thus showed that abstraction can create an immediate experience even in the absence of recognizable images.

Color and mark act directly on perception, inviting viewers to observe the relationships unfolding within the work.

Sicofoil and the Tents: beyond the boundaries of the canvas

One of Carla Accardi’s most important innovations was her use of Sicofoil, a transparent plastic material that she began working with in the 1960s.

This experimentation changed the traditional relationship between painting and surface.

In works made on transparent supports, the painted marks interact with the light and with whatever lies behind the material. The background is no longer necessarily an opaque, static surface; it can also include the surrounding space.

Painting thus enters into a relationship with the environment in which it is viewed.

This exploration gave rise to the celebrated Tents, structures in which painted transparent surfaces are arranged in three-dimensional forms.

With Tent (1965) and Triple Tent (1969), Accardi moved beyond the conception of the painting as an exclusively frontal image.

Viewers encounter a work that occupies space and can be perceived from different viewpoints.

Transparency, light, and the arrangement of marks continually transform the visual experience.

The Tents represent one of the most original moments in her career and demonstrate the artist’s ability to challenge the separation between painting, sculpture, and the environment.

Carla Accardi’s artworks: paintings, works on paper, and prints

Carla Accardi’s artistic output includes paintings on canvas, prints, experiments on plastic supports, and graphic works.

Despite the range of techniques and materials, certain elements remain constant: the mark, rhythm, the relationship between color and surface, and the pursuit of a dynamic balance between forms.

In the paintings of the 1950s, the marks grow dense and interweave, creating compositions in which the distinction between figure and background becomes uncertain.

With the return of color, these forms take on new vitality. They expand, overlap, and seem to move across the surface, transforming the image into a system of chromatic relationships.

Prints allow us to observe the artist’s language in a different format, where the arrangement of marks and their relationship with empty spaces often become particularly prominent.

Accardi also developed compositions in her prints that relate to her painterly explorations. Forms resembling imaginary scripts, rhythmic sequences, and color contrasts recur in works that retain a strong visual identity.

In screenprints in particular, the relationship between mark and color can achieve great intensity. The forms stand out against the surface and interact through overlaps, intervals, and contrasts, creating effects of movement and depth.

Printmaking is therefore not an unrelated chapter in her artistic journey, but a way to rediscover some of the central themes of her vision in works of different formats and characteristics.

From large canvases to compositions on paper, Carla Accardi’s work retains the ability to transform a group of abstract marks into a vivid image in which the eye continually discovers new relationships between forms, colors, and spaces.

Carla Accardi and feminism

Carla Accardi also holds an important place in the history of women’s emancipation and Italian feminism.

In 1970, she joined Carla Lonzi and Elvira Banotti in founding Rivolta Femminile, one of the most significant groups in the Italian feminist movement.

Her involvement arose in a cultural context in which women were demanding greater autonomy from traditional roles and dominant social structures.

For Accardi, independence was also a fundamental principle in artistic practice.

From the very beginning, she had forged her own path in a predominantly male environment, gradually establishing a distinctive and autonomous language.

However, her painting cannot be regarded as a simple visual translation of feminist ideas.

Accardi maintained a distinction between her artistic practice and her cultural activism, continuing to explore the possibilities of painting through forms, materials, and colors.

This independence makes her figure particularly significant in the history of twentieth-century Italian art.

Later explorations and international recognition

In the 1980s, Carla Accardi once again devoted particular attention to painting on canvas, developing new compositions characterized by ever-changing marks, colors, and spatial relationships.

Her work continued in the following decades through large-format works, diptychs, and triptychs, in which her abstract language continued to evolve.

Although she revisited elements found in earlier works, Accardi avoided limiting herself to repeating her own formal solutions.

The marks changed in size and arrangement, chromatic relationships were renewed, and the painted surface became a site of constant experimentation.

In 1988, she presented a solo exhibition room at the Venice Biennale, confirming the central place of her work in the Italian art scene.

Her international recognition grew further through exhibitions devoted to her work, including shows at MoMA PS1 in New York and the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris.

Carla Accardi died in Rome on February 23, 2014.

In 2024, Palazzo Esposizioni Roma dedicated a major retrospective to her on the centenary of her birth, tracing the different phases of a career marked by continuity and experimentation.

Carla Accardi: valuations and the art market

Carla Accardi’s artworks hold a significant place in the Italian postwar art market, thanks to the artist’s historical importance and the originality of her abstract explorations.

Her output spans different categories, from historic paintings and prints to graphic works, each with distinct characteristics and market values.

Carla Accardi’s market valuations vary according to the period in which a work was made, its medium, dimensions, provenance, and documentation.

Particular attention is paid to works that reflect pivotal moments in her practice, such as the mark-based compositions of the 1950s, her experiments with color, and her works on transparent materials.

Alongside paintings and unique works, her prints represent another aspect of her artistic career, appreciated by those wishing to explore and collect the language of Italian abstraction.

Each individual work nevertheless requires a specific assessment, without conflating the results achieved by the most important works with those of other categories.

Carla Accardi’s historical significance lies above all in her contribution to profoundly renewing abstract painting, developing an independent and recognizable practice over more than sixty years.

Her artworks continue to testify to one of the most original developments in contemporary Italian art, in which mark and color become instruments of continual visual invention.