Carla Accardi

Germano Celant, Carla Accardi Catalogue Raisonne, Milano 2010,  illustrated p 142,  n 1972 34

Condition: This work is in very good condition. There are very minor rubbing marks around the outer edges and the centre. There is no restoration apparent under the UV light. Colour: The catalogue illustration is accurate, but the overall tonality is less fluorescent and with lower contrast in the original work.
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Born in 1924, Accardi trained at the Accademia di belle arti, Florence, before moving to Rome in 1946. She was affiliated with Forma 1, the group of Italian artists who set out to carve out a space for artistic abstraction within a Marxist politico-aesthetic agenda.

Accardi is renowned for her geometric abstractions and deconstructed canvases.  In many ways her work is emblematic of the postwar condition; it highlights the radical and irreversible breakdown of all cultural and political discourses in a Europe blighted by the Final Solution and the ineffaceable rhetoric of the Third Reich. While the Marxist approach to cultural objects was one which demanded the promulgation of a particular worldview, Forma 1 sought to posit the group’s deliberate rejection of clear representation as a meaningful decision to privilege form and sign; something which could transcend the implicit limits of figuration. The group eventually dissolved in the 1960s, but Accardi continued to favour abstraction. The gradual introduction of Arabic calligraphy and quasi-hieroglyphic elements into the artist’s work served as more of a formal and conceptual experiment than as a move towards figuration.

Accardi’s gestural, linear forms seem to blur the distinctions between shape, symbol and script, and ludically break down the traditional attribution of meaning to mark-making. The present work Azzurro Rosso, is a vibrant example of Accardi’s tendency to break down semantic fields and bring the very idea of order and lexis in to consideration.