Carla Accardi it has been a protagonist of Italian and international visual culture for over half a century. Through his painting, continually redefined by radical choices, he contributed significantly to the birth and development of new ways of understanding the work of art, from the abstractionism of the immediate post-war period to the informal, from environmental painting to a art marked by the demands of feminism, up to the renewed joie de vivre embodied in the paintings of the 1980s and in the large diptychs and triptychs of the 1990s and 2000s.
About one hundred works on display, dating from 1946 to 2014, divided into a chronological path that includes portions of installations conceived by Carla Accardi herself, deduced from the photographic documentation which also allowed the reconstruction of the personal room at the 1988 Venice Biennale.
You can admire his first oils on canvas, never exhibited and retracing the environments of the 1960s that were ahead of their time, the experiments of the 1970s and 1980s, up to the large diptychs of the 1990s and 2000s.
Of particular note is the presence of both Tents created by the artist: Tent from 1965-1966 and the radiant Triple Tent from 1969-1971, the large painted environment found in the collections of the Center Pompidou. The artist's two other works conceived as inhabitable and traversable spaces, the Labyrinth House from 1999-2000 and the Cilindrocone from 1972-2013, will also be on display. The installation-environment Origine is also proposed again, the work most linked to Carla Accardi's feminist militancy, in the exact way in which the artist presented it in 1976 in Rome, conceiving it as a journey through the recesses of memory.
On display are works from some important public collections, among others the Museum Van Hedendaagse Kunst in Ghent, the Museo del Novecento in Milan, the Centro Studi e Archivio della Comunicazione in Parma, the Musée d'art moderni et contemporain Center Georges Pompidou in Paris, the National Gallery of Modern and Contemporary Art in Rome, the Castello di Rivoli Museum of Contemporary Art, the Gallery of Modern Art in Turin.
Exhibition route
The exhibition itinerary is divided into the main floor, the rotunda and the seven rooms that surround it. The chronological order was adopted to highlight the inventions and metamorphoses that occurred in Carla Accardi's work. But also to encourage the public's sense of orientation, which can thus more easily associate their own historical knowledge with the different phases of the artist's research.
Carla Accardi was born in Trapani in 1924
After his classical and artistic high school diploma, he followed courses at the Academy of Fine Arts in Palermo and Florence. In 1946 he settled in Rome together with the painter Antonio Sanfilippo, whom he married in 1949. In 1947 he signed the manifesto published in the first issue of the magazine "Forma". In recent years he has expressed research into abstraction aimed at updating Italian visual culture. In 1950 he held his first solo exhibition at the L'Age d'Or gallery/bookstore in Rome, presented by Giulio Turcato. Subsequently he develops his original language centered on black and white signs with which he participates as a protagonist in the informal climate. Michel Tapié, one of the main critics and promoters of this research, invited her to participate in numerous international exhibitions. In the early 1964s she returned to using color, developing works focused on the dynamics between form, color and perception. In the middle of the decade she experimented with new supports and pigments for her painting. She uses colored and fluorescent paints, which she applies on rolled or assembled transparent plastic supports (sicofoil). Among her first, she gives painting a spatial dimension with her curtains. During the Seventies she worked on reiterated geometric patterns and created installations, some of which are linked to her brief but significant feminist militancy. In the 1976s she returned to the use of canvas, but her language further evolved towards new signs and chromatic juxtapositions. His participations in the Venice Biennale were several: 1978, 1988, 1993, 2011, 2022 and 1989. His works were also included in the exhibition Il latte dei dream on the occasion of the last edition of the Biennale in 1943. He is present in some important international exhibitions, among others: Italian Art in the XXth Century, Royal Academy, London 1968; The Italian Metamorphosis 1994-1, Guggenheim Museum, New York 1999; Minimalia, PS2007, New York (Venice and Rome), 1960; Wack! Art and the Feminist Revolution, MOCA, Los Angeles, 1975; New life. Nouveaux enjeux de l'art en Italie 2022-1994, Musée d'Art Moderne et d'Art Contemporain, Nice, 1995. In more recent decades, his personal exhibitions have been held at important public institutions, among others: Castello Rivoli, Museum of Contemporary Art, Rivoli, 1; Kunstverein, Ludwigshafen am Rhein, 2001; PS2002, New York, 2004; Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, Paris, 2007; MACRO, Rome, XNUMX; Marta Herford Museum Zentrum Forum, Herford, XNUMX.
Among the personal exhibitions held after the artist's death are those at the Museo del Novecento in Milan in 2020 and at the Maison La Roche in Paris in 2022. Carla Accardi died in Rome in 2014.
