Carla Accardi à la Maison La Roche
MASSIMODECARLO, in collaboration with Archivio Accardi Sanfilippo and Fondation Le Corbusier are delighted to present Carla Accardi à la Maison La Roche, from October 4 to 29, 2022, in Paris.
Organized with the Archivio and the Foundation, this unique presentation dedicated to Italian artist Carla Accardi (1924 – 2014) is her first solo exhibition in a Parisian institution since her show at MAMVP, Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris curated by Laurence Bossé and Hans-Ulrich Obrist in 2002.
Presented within this iconic modern home built between 1923 and 1925 by Le Corbusier, Carla Accardi à la Maison La Roche is an invitation to rediscover Accardi’s work.
A major Italian post-war artist, Carla Accardi was born in Trapani, Sicily, in 1924. After studying in Palermo, she moves to Rome in 1946, where her artistic career sets off. As the only woman and founding member of the artistic group “Forma”, she quickly establishes herself as a leading figure on the international artistic and intellectual scene, both for the singularity of her practice and for the ardor of her political commitment.
Finding her voice in abstraction, she develops her painterly vocabulary around the notion of «poetics of the sign», which will prove to be both the fil rouge and backbone of her career.
The works presented today at Maison La Roche illustrate the evolution of her practice thematically, from her iconic 1960’s sicofoils, to her return to color and canvas in the 1980’s.
Quattro Triangoli arancio, 1970 Marrone, 1974 Trasparente, 1975 Quattro triangoli, 1979 Quadro a Spina, 1979
In 1964, Accardi inaugurates a groundbreaking chapter in her career by choosing to replace her canvases with sicofoil. This transparent, malleable plastic sheet opens her field of experimentation to revolutionary new possibilities: not only does the transparency of this cellulose acetate allow her to go beyond the frame, as illustrated with Marrone, she also pushes her material experimentation further by creating woven patterns directly with the sicofoil, which she embroiders directly onto their frames – like in Trasparente. With sicofoil, she emancipates her expression from the classic square or rectangular frames, producing geometric assemblages, like in Quadrato a Spina and Quattro Triangoli arancio.
Ombrello gialloblu, 1999 Orizzonte senza riga, 2005 Poeti e atei, 2012 Profilo d’onda, 2012 Giallo-nero, 2012 Smarrire i fili delle voci, 2012 Pose variopinte, 2013
In the 1980’s, Carla Accardi returns to her initial formal research, onto canvas, that she marks with her abstract signs and writing. Her richly colored paintings acquire a new dimension, with high contrast shapes, geometric voids. She thus finds a new balance between expressive freedom and rigor, a very personal synthesis of painting as language and lyrical form. The titles of the works presented today at la Maison La Roche, show this emphasis shift, from a purely formal approach to more autobiographical and cultural references, such as Smarrire i fili delle voci, Poeti e atei and Orizzonte senza riga, which reveal her new relationship to painting and to reality.
The illusion of simplicity, or the simplicity of illusion, thus unfold throughout Accardi’s work, who makes the search for the true meaning of painting the quest of her entire career. An approach that resonates particularly in the context of its presentation at the heart of Le Corbusier’s Maison La Roche.
This presentation is the third personal exhibition that MASSIMODECARLO devotes to Carla Accardi, after Carla Accardi at Home, at Casa Corbellini-Wasserman in Milan in 2021 and Illusione at MASSIMODECARLO Piece Unique in Paris in 2022.
The Artist
Carla Accardi (1924 - 2014) is one of the most important exponents of abstract painting in Italy after World War II. Born on October 9, 1924, in Trapani, she studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Florence before moving to Rome in 1946, where she founded the influential postwar group Form 1 (1947–51), the main reference for abstract art in Italy in the ‘40s and ‘50s.
Her early paintings consisted of interlocking geometric forms. In the 1950s, Accardi was involved in the wide-reaching attempts to revolutionize abstraction through the hybridization of geometric and gestural painting, both in Italy and in France, where art critic Michel Tapié took an interest in her work. In 1953 Accardi began to introduce pseudo-calligraphic signs into abstract images, while reducing her palette to white-on-black compositions to explore the relationship between figure and ground.
In the 1960s, however, there is a rejuvenation of color in her works with references to the metropolitan culture and optical effects. Accardi’s artistic research was characterized by a continuous experimentation radicalized with the use of transparent plastic supports that accentuate the nature of the painting as a luminous diaphragm. In 1961 indeed, she began painting on sicofoil, a transparent plastic, instead of canvas. She showcased these new strategies at the 1964 Venice Biennale. By the mid-1960s, she was using these new materials sculpturally. This phase of Accardi’s oeuvre, which was celebrated in the Ambiente/Arte section of the 1976 Venice Biennale, would prove infl uential for Arte Povera. In the 1980s she returned to canvas and shift ed her focus to the use of signs and chromatic juxtapositions. In 1988 she participated again at the Venice Biennale, while in 1994 she took part to Th e Italian Metamorphosis 1943–1968, held at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, in 1994.
Her work is part of many important collections, including the Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna in Rome, the Museo d’Arte Contemporanea of Castello di Rivoli (Turin), the Gallerie Civiche of Modena and Bologna, the Palazzo Reale in Milan, and the Museo Civico in Turin. Th e artist died in Rome on February 23, 2014.