(Trapani 1924–2014 Rome)
“Integrazione”, 1958, signed, dated Accardi 58, titled, signed and dated Accardi 1958 on the reverse, inscribed with no. 189 and measurements, casein on canvas, 69 x 100 cm, framed, (PP)

Provenance:
Private Collection, Germany

Exhibited:
La Spezia, X Mostra Nazionale di Pittura Premio Golfo della Spezia, 1959, no. 258 (2 labels on the reverse)
Frankfurt am Main, Frankfurter Westend Galerie, 16 March – 4 May 1985

Literature:
Germano Celant, Carla Accardi, Charta, Milan 1999, no. 1958 6, page 267 with ill.

Carla Accardi has every right to be considered among the most important contemporary artists of the post war years in Italy. Moreover, she was also a trailblazer of abstract art and a pioneer of feminism.
She was born in Trapani on 9 October 1924, gifted with highly artistic sensibilities. In 1949, following courses at the Academy of Fine Arts of Palermo and Florence she moved to Rome, attending the studios of Via Margutta. Here she got to know many young and promising artists who became both friends and colleagues. In 1947 she joined the Formalist movement and, with her friends Consagra, Attardi, Dorazio, Guerrini, Perilli, Turcato and Sanfilippo (whom she married in 1949), she signed a manifesto written by the Gruppo Forma 1, an avant-garde group of Marxist origins. She participated in numerous collective exhibitions both in Italy and abroad, and she held her first solo show at the Galleria Numero in Florence. This was followed in 1950 by an exhibition at the Galleria Libreria Age d’Or presented by Turcato.After having discovered a fascination for the decomposition of Cubism, Accardi – who was more and more determined to follow her own path – fixed on the poetry of the sign, which led her to create works that were ever more recognisable and unique. She created a universe that was uniquely hers, made up of intertwining signs that repulse and attract each other. These marks become mysterious writing, both abstract and two-dimensional, which compress the distance between the background and the sign.
She painted from top to bottom, first on paper and then on canvas, which she would lay out on the floor. Photographs of her often show her working on the floor or at a table, but never using an easel. She looked for freedom and her symbols had to feel free to expand without limits, without spacial constraints.
During the 1950s her works, characterised by groups of white pictorial elements on a black background (as, for example, in the present “Integrazione” from 1958), were strongly supported by critic and theorist of Arte Informale Michel Tapié, who invited her to exhibitions that he curated in Italy and abroad. It is interesting at this point to quote the artist’s answer to Maurizio Calvesi’s question as to whether or not there is a narrative intention in her paintings:

M.C.: Is there a narrative intention in this decomposition of space and time? That is, do you want to tell something with your art or rather…

C.A.: Now, yes. Because at present I want to tell something. When I started, on the other hand, it was simply a question of perceptive suggestion – but consciously. I thought: black and white and subdivisions: that cannot be a painting from the 19th century, it has to be a painting from 1959.
Every experience that I have had is important for me from a visual perspective because white on black should give a suggestion of luminosity. Then Tapié took an interest in me and began to discuss my work within the context of art informel, because of my lines etc. But he exaggerated, and finally suggested regarding my work as baroque art. And I had to refuse, but only because I felt distant and free…
(Maurizio Calvesi and Carla Accardi, interview in “Marcatrè“, July, August, September, 1964)

For me, Accardi’s work signifies the perception of colour and line in their pure state. The pleasure of the eye when it encounters the physicality of the colour which acts first and foremost by itself, that is, by means of its dynamic properties of concentration and expansion, and then immediately after in its richness of metaphorical suggestion. It is a pleasure that is complex and immediate at the same time. It does not take long to realise that the painted surface is the outcome of an extremely thought-through, critically aware process. It requires a syntactic organisation that also gives pleasure in itself through its absolute transparency.
(Filiberto Menna, in “Artificio e Natura”, catalogue of Galleria Il Milione, Milan)