Project Description

Carla Accardi (Trapani 1924 – Rome 2014), Parenthesis No. 8 (Emerald Green)

Vinyl on canvas 60 x 80 cm, signed (Accardi) and dated (82) lower left.

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Exhibitions
Erice, Carla Accardi opere 1965 – 1983, Ex Convento San Carlo, July – October 1983.

Publications
Carla Accardi. Catalogo ragionato, curated by Germano Celant, Edizioni Charta, Milan 1999, n. 1982/10.

“In the Fifties, first an essential sign, then a structural one. The sign is an element that is part of the universe. I don’t remember the year well but I think it was around 1952. I had a year of crisis, I thought I could do nothing more in painting. I had isolated myself and started drawing directly on the floor. I traced signs. I used white on black, it stimulated me, it seemed to me something unique. From that moment I started making drawings one on the other that produced highly differentiated signs. At the beginning there was not much grace. But from their study a population was born, a forest, a reinvented nature, almost like giant constructions that I dreamed of at night. “With these words, Carla Accardi told the genesis of her research characterized by the definition of a sign, made, gradually, increasingly imposing.
Eight biennials active, prolific and vital, the Sicilian artist, lady of Italian abstractionism, one of the most refined interpreters of the Forma 1 Group, belongs to that generation of women who since the 1940s have decreed the end of the marginalization of female creativity. The work presented here is placed in the full maturity of the journey led by the Sicilian artist: realized in 1982, it constitutes one of the last proofs of his research, undertaken since the mid-Fifties, oriented in the direction of sign automatism: the poetics of sign-color, which is articulated by sets of pictorial segments laid out on homogeneous backgrounds. In particular after the series “Rotoli” and “Lenzuoli” which completed the group of works that investigate relations with the environment, and installations such as “Tenda” and “Triple tent”, made for the Editalia Gallery in Rome and for the section Art Environment of the 1976 Biennale, the apex of his research on spatial relationships, in the 1980s she returned to two-dimensionality with the series called “Capricci” and “Parentesi”, using rough canvas.

Carla Accardi

It is precisely to this phase that the work presented here belongs, in which the stratification of signs of form, color and different density are distributed on a surface whose perimeter evokes a “hortus conclusus” in which the creativity of the artist is harnessed: the limit thus it becomes an obstacle and an ordinating norm at the same time. In this way, starting from the dynamism of abstract pictorial elements, Accardi pushes its compositions towards the edges of the canvas, almost as if to capture the phenomenological experience of the space that deviates and expands. Its forms fluctuate in space with vibrant energy, while color in its chromatic interactions is examined scientifically, in the exciting visual provocation of an intense luminosity, or tiny flashes. After the series of “Parentesi”, Accardi is again present at the 1988 Biennale with a personal room and participates in the main historical reviews of 20th century Italian art, in Italy and abroad. In 1999, Germano Celant publishes an important monograph on her work.