Carla Accardi: Touch People First and Then Make Them Understand

Towards abstractionism

Carla Accardi was born in Trapani on 9 October 1924. Interested in art from a very young age, she attended the Academy of Fine Arts in Palermo, where in 1944 she met Antonio Sanfilippo. After a while, she moved to Florence, where she stayed only two months; the academy was not for her, her artistic references were Kandinskij, Klee, Mondrian.

Forma 1 Group

In 1946, she left her art studies and moved to Rome with Antonio Sanfilippo, where they began to visit Pietro Consagra's studio in via Margutta 48, forging a strong bond with the artists Giulio Turcato, Piero Dorazio, Mino Guerrini, Ugo Attardi, and Achille Perilli.

Together, they gave life to the "Forma 1 Group" in 1947, proclaiming themselves "formalists and Marxists, convinced that the terms Marxism and formalism are not irreconcilable", supporters of a possible mediation between abstractionism and realism.

The group supports the concept of a structured but unrealistic art, where form and sign are represented in their purest meaning, excluded from any symbolist or psychoanalytic pretension.

First exhibitions

In particular, Carla Accardi's path veers towards the purest abstractionism; her first painting from 1947 is entitled Breakdown. For Accardi, art cannot always have as its content the figure of man, "art can and must be like music, which has qualities in itself and transmits spirituality".

In 1948, she married Antonio Sanfilippo. The first personal and group exhibitions began in 1950, such as the "Arte d'Oggi" exhibition at Palazzo Strozzi in Florence and "Abstract and concrete art in Italy" at the National Gallery of Modern Art in Rome.

The poetics of the sign

1952 is a decisive year for Accardi's artistic education. After a period of artistic crisis, in fact, she began to draw signs on the ground, white on black:

“from that moment, I started making overlapping drawings that produced strongly differentiated signs… a population was born in her study, a wild forest, a reinvented nature, almost of the giant buildings that I dreamed of at night. Every day, I reviewed the works. But the sign is not only a way for the unconscious to vent steam. It is artistic expression and language. A sign exists in relation to others since it forms a structure with them."

Diaphragms

The sixties marked great stylistic changes. In the works of these years, the colour reappears to take on an increasingly leading role. Colours are used by Accardi to accompany the poetic emotion of the sign, maintaining a rational grammar of primary and complementary hues.

Shortly thereafter, she began the first experiments with sicofoil, sheets of transparent acetate that were used for the first time by the artist. This material is "capable of making the colours radiant and chemically hallucinating, until they passed through them in a transparency of pure light. Transparency is the new element that, through the need for space, determines a sense of dynamism, a sort of vitality of the sign that begins to vibrate in space, to overlap and blend, to project its own shadow, thus alluding to an evident reality and a less conspicuous one" (Danilo Eccher).

Tent and Spaces (Tenda and Ambienti)

The work on transparency and light that crosses the space develops through a real volumetric composition of the space itself. Conceived between 1965 and 1966, Tenda (Tent) is developed together with her friend and art critic Carla Lonzi, and emerged from deep reflections on the concept of a nomadic and light dwelling, reduced to the bare essentials. A somewhat liberating process compared to the traditional home model, which places a "heavy" burden, in particular, on the shoulders of every woman.

Relationship with politics

A member of the Communist Party until the early 1950s, Carla Accardi moved away from politics in years when politics itself did not go hand in hand with the abstract avant-garde art. In the post-war period, in fact, the field of art was highly politicised and dominated predominantly by the neorealist current.

Years later, Accardi became politically involved again, at the dawn of the Italian feminist movement of the seventies. The relationship between Accardi and Lonzi, matured with the artistic experience of the Tenda, is more and more cohesive and is sealed with the drafting of the first poster Female Uprising of 1970, signed by both women together with the activist Elvira Banotti. Experience from which Accardi will slowly distance herself: “I've abandoned certain positions as almost exclusively political interpretations emerged. Politics concerns me as a human being but not as an artist."

Always get back in the game

In the 1980s, Accardi returned to the canvas, which was often left raw, animated by coloured signs that had now become very large, at times using a single colour. There are many personal exhibitions between the late 1980s and early 2000s (Contemporary Art Pavilion in Milan, 1983; XLIII Venice Biennale, 1988; Castello di Rivoli, 1994; Guggenheim in New York, 1994; Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, 2002; MACRO of Rome, 2004).

The monumental catalogue raisonné of her work, edited by Germano Celant, is published in two volumes in 2011. “My painting cannot stop on a problem, place and define the same once and for all. I like to revolve around this problem, explore different solutions, be coherent and, at the same time, open to change." Carla Accardi, who never grew tired of looking for and crossing new frontiers, passed away in Rome on 23 February 2014.