b. 1924, Trapani, Italy

Born on October 9, 1924, in Trapani, Italy, Carla Accardi trained as a painter at the Accademie di Belle Arti in Florence before moving to Rome in 1946. There, she met the artists with whom she would establish the influential postwar group Forma 1 in 1947: Pietro Consagra, Piero Dorazio, Mino Guerrini, Achille Perilli, Antonio Sanfilippo (whom she would marry), and Giulio Turcato. Forma 1 was dedicated to reconciling Marxist politics with abstract art. The group's first exhibition was in Rome in 1947. Accardi's first solo show followed, in 1950, at the Galleria Age d'Or in Rome. Her early paintings consisted of interlocking geometric forms.

With the 1950s in Europe came attempts to revolutionize abstraction through the hybridization of geometric abstraction and gestural painting. Accardi was involved in this wide-reaching trend both in Italy, where she appeared in the 1951 exhibition Arte astratta e concreta in Italia at the Galleria Nazionale d'Arte Moderna in Rome, and in France, where the critic Michel Tapié took an interest in her work. (Tapié would later write the introduction to the catalogue accompanying Accardi's 1959 solo exhibition at the Galleria Notizie in Turin.) Accardi's work transformed rapidly during this period. After forswearing painting from 1952 to 1953, she began to introduce pseudo-calligraphic signs into abstract images, as in Labirinto a settori (1957), while reducing her palette to white-on-black compositions to explore the relationship between figure and ground.

In 1961, when Accardi joined the Continuitá group, she reintegrated color into her paintings and began painting on transparent sicofoil plastic instead of canvas. She showcased these new strategies at the 1964 Venice Biennale, where she was given her own room. By the mid-1960s, she was using these new materials sculpturally. Tenda (1965) and Triplice Tenda (1969) feature sheets of plastic assembled into a tent and covered with brightly colored brushstroke patterns. This phase of Accardi's oeuvre, which was celebrated in the “Ambiente/Arte” section of the 1976 Venice Biennale, would prove influential for the Arte Povera [more] movement of the late 1960s and 1970s.

In recent decades, Accardi has appeared in many major exhibitions, including Avanguardia e Transavanguardia at the Mura Aureliana in Rome (1982), her return to conventional painting coinciding with the rise of Neo-Expressionism [more]. Her work has also been featured in Italienische Kunst 1900/1980 at the Frankfurter Kunstverein (1985), the Venice Biennale (1988), Italian Art in the Twentieth Century at the Royal Academy of Arts in London (1989), and The Italian Metamorphosis, 1948-1968 at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum (1994). In 1996, she completed a mosaic for the Rome subway. Her first solo exhibition in the United States, Triplice Tenda, was held at P.S. 1 in New York in 2001, and the Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris presented a retrospective exhibition of her work in 2002. Accardi was named Accademico di Brera in Milan in 1996 and received the Cavaliere di Gran Croce the following year. She lives and works in Rome.