(b Trápani, 9 Oct 1924). Italian painter. After training at the Accademie di Belle Arte in Palermo and Florence, she moved to Rome in 1946, where she met the Sicilian artists Pietro Consagra, Ugo Attardi (b 1923) and Antonio Sanfilippo (1923–80), the last of whom she married in 1949. Together with Giulio Turcato, Mino Guerrini (b 1927), Piero Dorazio and Achille Perilli (b 1927), the group established FORMA in 1947 to promote an abstract Marxist art distinct from social realism. Accardi participated in the Forma exhibition (October 1947; Rome, A. Club) with work still indebted to post-Cubism (e.g. Decomposition, 1947; U. Parma, Cent. Studi & Archv Communic.). After one-woman shows in Rome (Lib. Age Or, 1950) and Milan (Lib. Salto, 1951), and having established contact with the Movimento Arte Concreta, Accardi visited Paris. There the contrasting static and energetic work of Alberto Magnelli and Hans Hartung initiated a crisis of direction, and she abandoned painting in 1952–3. On resuming, her dynamic and calligraphic marks in the largely black-and-white Integrazione series (e.g. Negative-Positive, 1956; artist’s col., see 1986–7 exh. cat., p. 28) achieved a balance between sign and ground, surface and space. Their spontaneity as traces of existential experience brought her wide recognition in Italy and France. After joining the Continuità group in 1961 in reaction to Art informel, she reintroduced colour, applying repeated rhythmic strokes to transparent plastic, which afforded an open ground (e.g. Red–Black, 1967; artist’s col., see 1986–7 exh. cat., p. 44). In the 1970s she mounted plastic on shaped stretchers with which she created fragile environments that influenced the practitioners of Arte Povera. When she subsequently reverted to painting on canvas, she adopted greater variety in her mark-making.

• Accardi, Carla
  • groups and movements
    • Continuità
    • Dorazio, Piero
    • Forma
    • Italy, §III, 7(ii): Painting, from 1946
    • Rome, §III, 8: Art life and organization, after 1900