Material Variations, 2011, vinyl on canvas, 31 1/2 × 39 3/8 in.
©Foto Massimo Listri
Carla Accardi (Trapani 1924 – Rome 2014)
She attended the Academy of Fine Arts in Palermo, where she met Antonio Sanfilippo, with whom she moved to Rome in 1946. In 1947 she joined the Forma group. In 1948 she took part in the 24th Venice Biennale. The following year she married Sanfilippo. Until 1952 she was active in the field of concrete art, later moving toward a poetics of signs. In 1954, the French critic Michel Tapié included her among the protagonists of his theorization of Art autre, launching her as a sign artist, especially in black and white. In the works of the 1960s, color reappears, with more vivid and varied tones, while the signs change structure. In 1964 she was invited to have a personal room at the Venice Biennale, where she returned in 1976 for the Ambiente/Arte (Environment/Art) show curated by Germano Celant. The 1970s were dedicated to experimentation with sicofoil and transparency. In the 1980s she returned to painting on canvas, which she often used untreated, marking it with colored signs. In 1988 the Biennale dedicated a personal room to her, while the following year she exhibited at the Royal Academy of Arts in London. Among her retrospectives, the exhibitions at Castello di Rivoli in 1994, at Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris in 2002 and at MACRO in Rome in 2004.
Analyzing Carla Accardi’s most recent works, made between the late 1990s and the first decade of the 20th century, Germano Celant has shown how the artist has evoked motifs and images that are deeply rooted in her previous investigations, traveling “always on the edge of mutation, without forgetting her history and discipline,” addressing “her own past and her own imaginary contributions, without making it a stagnating and desiccated subject, but rather as a source of positive resistance.” In her Material Variations, Accardi returned to structuring the canvas in a simplified pattern, formed by the interweaving on a white background of a few sweeping shapes in a limited number of colors, as she had done in a small group of paintings from 1960 and 1961, such as White Black Closed (1960-1961) or Blue Gray (1961). In the paintings and sicofoil works she made in the late 1960s and 1970s, the typically generous and bustling repetition of signs, first in black and white and then in color, achieved highly original optical results, creating a sense of depth through layers endlessly overlapping in transparency. In these mature works, this repetition is subtler, developing in more controlled patterns: the paint, spread evenly on the canvas, is reduced to its essence in a way that is unique and unprecedented in the artist’s work. (Paola Bonani)