CARLA ACCARDI

A retrospective designed to mark the 100th anniversary of her birth

6 March – 9 June 2024

Palazzo Esposizioni Rome

curated by Daniela Lancioni and Paola Bonani

IMAGES > https://www.palazzoesposizioniroma.it/pagina/carla-accardi-stampa

Starting 6 March 2024, Palazzo Esposizioni and the city of Rome will be celebrating Carla Accardi (Trapani, 1924 – Rome, 2014), marking the hundredth anniversary of her birth with a major anthological exhibition, the most exhaustive exhibition of Accardi’s work ever devoted to her to date in terms of the number and importance of exhibits it will be showcasing, including the Triple Tent (1969–71) from the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris.

The exhibition, promoted by Rome the Capital City’s Cultural Affairs Department and Azienda Speciale Palaexpo, has been devised, produced and organised by Azienda Speciale Palaexpo in conjunction with the Archivio Accardi Sanfilippo and with the support of the Fondazione Silvano Toti.

The exhibition is curated by Azienda Speciale Palaexpo resident curators Daniela Lancioni and Paola Bonani, who have also edited the catalogue.

A key figure of outstanding importance, Carla Accardi played a decisive role in contemporary Italian and international visual culture for over half a century. Through her painting, ceaselessly redefined by her radical choices, she made a crucial contribution to the birth and development of new ways of understanding a work of art: from the abstract art of the immediate postwar years and informal art to environmental art and an art marked by the tenets of feminism, right up to the renewal of the joie de vivre embodied in her painting of the 1980s and in her large diptychs and triptychs of the 1990s and 2000s.

Uniquely for an Italian artist of her generation, she also forged significant ties with artists and thinkers younger than herself at every stage of her career.

The exhibition will be showcasing some 100 artworks dated 1946 to 2014, displayed in chronological order and including parts of the layouts that she personally designed, based on photographic documentation which has enabled the curators to reconstruct even her own personal room at the 1988 Venice Biennale.

Thanks to these ‘grafts’, the curators were able in designing the exhibition to turn to the artist’s own ‘exhibition style’, thus capturing the extreme freedom in her approach to the relationship between an artwork and its space as she flew in the face of convention and launched new practices.

The masterpieces have been chosen with the intention both of highlighting the developmental phases of Carla Accardi’s work, and of presenting works in which the artist expressed her most radical nature and which have proven to be of seminal importance on the national and international art scene.

Visitors will be able to admire her early oils on canvas, never before shown in public, and to review the start of her career in the Forma team while exploring the various phases of her work: her original definition of the drawn mark, her radical use of black and white and the subsequent iridescent appearance of colour, her dematerialisation of the body of painting and her discovery of the transparent sicofoil surface, the artistic circles of the 1960s that were ahead of their time and her experiments of the ‘70s and ‘80s, right up to her large diptychs of the ‘90s and the 2000s.

Of particular interest is the presence in the exhibition of both her Tents: Tent dated 1965–6 and the radiant Triple Tent dated 1969–71, a large painted space that is now part of the collections of the Centre Pompidou.

Two other works that the artist conceived as spaces which could be lived in and passed through, the Labyrinth House dated 1999–2000 and the Cylindrocone dated 1972–2013, will also be on display.

The exhibition will likewise host her installation-environment entitled Origin, the work most closely associated with her militant feminism, displaying it in exactly the same way as she presented it in Rome in 1976 when she conceived of it as a path for exploring the recesses of memory.

The exhibition hosts artworks from several important public collections, including the Museum Van Hedendaagse Kunst in Ghent, the Museo del Novecento in Milan, the Centro Studi e Archivio della Comunicazione in Parma, the Musée d’art moderne et contemporain Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris, the Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea in Rome, the Museo d’arte moderna Castello di Rivoli, and the Galleria d’Arte Moderna in Turin.

THE EXHIBITION

The exhibition unfolds on the piano nobile, in the rotunda and in the seven rooms around it. Chronological order has been chosen both to highlight the inventions and changes that followed on from one another in Carla Accardi’s work, and also to facilitate visitors’ sense of orientation so that they can more easily link their own historical knowledge to the various stages in the artist’s career.

Room 1

This room is devoted to Carla Accardi’s earlier works and to her various – and little-known – experiments, before she settled on her iconic drawn marks.

The ‘youthful’ works on display here include View Over a Tennis Court, a small painting dated 1947 published in black and white in the magazine “Forma” (never before displayed and never published in colour); Decompositions dated 1947; the temperas on paper that the artist showed at her first one-woman show at Rome’s Age d’Or gallery in 1951; her paintings of 1950–1, including Composition dated 1950 from the Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea in Rome; some of the first paintings in which we find the marks that became such a feature of her work, including Large Grey Brown dated 1954 from the Centro Studi e Archivio della Comunicazione in Parma, and Textural With Greys dated 1954 from the Galleria d’Arte Moderna in Turin.

Room 2

This room documents Carla Accardi’s best-known work produced between 1955 and 1961, which is remarkable for the presence of almost biomorphic marks and for her radical decision to paint in black and white. These were the years in which the artist’s work enjoyed the greatest success, the years of her important partnership with French art critic, curator and theoretician Michel Tapié.

The artworks on display in the room include Archer in White dated 1955 from the Galleria d’Arte Moderna in Turin, Large Integration dated 1957 from the Museo del Novecento in Milan, Red Siege no. 3 dated 1956 from a private collection and Carla Accardi’s first large-scale painting entitled Large Grey Rectangle dated 1960 from a private collection, a diptych which may be seen as a pointer to her later spaces or environments on account of the way she installed it in 1961.

Room 3

This room hosts the works she produced in 1963–6 and, in sharp contrast with the previous room, it documents the explosion of colour in Carla Accardi’s work, along with her experiments with new materials, sicofoil, and with the ‘emergence from the picture’ tested in Rolls and in her first seminal space, Tent dated 1965–6. The room also hosts some of the paintings with which the artist adorned the room dedicated to her work at the Venice Biennale of 1964.

The works on display include Greenred dated 1962 from the Intesa Sanpaolo Collection in Milan, Purplered (Council) dated 1963 from the Museo del Novecento in Milan, Orient dated 1964 from the Giancarlo and Danna Olgiati Collection in Lugano, Tent dated 1965–6 from a private collection,

and Rolls dated 1966–71, partly from the Castello di Rivoli and partly from the Archivio Accardi Sanfilippo.

Rotunda

The rotunda hosts the Triple Tent dated 1969–71, a large space now part of the Centre Pompidou collections and one of the most representative and demanding of the artist’s works.

Room 4

This room hosts a number of different and significant forays into the environmental dimension on Carla Accardi’s part.

In Ghent We Opened a Window dated 1971–86 from the Museum Van Hedengaagse in Ghent is a work produced by Carla Accardi for the celebrated exhibition entitled “Chambres d’amis”, when artists were asked to place their works in the private homes of the museum’s friends and collectors.

Labyrinth House dated 1999 – 2000 and Cylindrocone dated 1972 – 2013, both from the Archivio Accardi Sanfilippo, are environments or spaces that visitors will be able to freely access.

The room will also host the large frieze (12 mt. long) entitled They Divide in Vain dated 2006, replicating a frieze she made in Tangier, in Morocco, in 1972, from the Archivio Accardi Sanfilippo.

Room 5

This room documents Carla Accardi’s work that appeared in the course of the 1970s, a period with which the artist associated the concept of “tabula rasa” on more than one occasion.

The room is accessed through a long, narrow, purpose-built space containing the work Origin dated 1976, which she made for her one-woman show at the Cooperativa di Via Beato Angelico in Rome. In Palazzo Esposizioni the work is presented for the first time in the way that the artist herself devised it, as a kind of crossing that can be likened to the practice of self-awareness experienced by the artist with Rivolta Femminile, the feminist group which she co-founded.

The room also hosts a recreation of one of the walls in her one-woman show at Paola Betti’s gallery in Milan in 1978, where she caused new pictures with highly unusual shapes to fluctuate, for example the privately-owned Four Green Trapezia or Ten Triangles from the Archivio Accardi Sanfilippo, both dated 1978.

Room 6

This room faithfully reproduces the large personal room devised by the artist at the Venice Biennale of 1988 (apart from two paintings which it has proven impossible to track down).

These paintings, all of them large, manage as a group to offer a complete overview of Carla Accardi’s work in the 1980s.

The artworks on display include Large Diptych dated 1986, Imaginary Animal 3 dated 1987 and Large Purple Caprice dated 1988, all from private collections.

Room 7

The layout of the final room in the exhibition sets out to testify to the incandescent creative temperature that marked Carla Accardi’s work right up to the end of her life.

The leitmotif of the artworks, dated to the 1990s and 2000s, is Carla Accardi’s unique ‘revisitation’ of her drawn marks, in which she breaks them up, expands them, enlarges them and relates them in various different ways to shadow. The room recreates the incisive dialogue orchestrated by the artist at the Galleria Pieroni in Rome in 1992 between her three large diptychs, Large Blackwhite, Nocturnal Movements and Large Whiteblack, all dated 1991 and all from private collections, along with Vortex of the Green Wind dated 1998, a large triptych from the Bank of Italy’s collections, and an installation entitled Marks and Forms dated 2007 from the Archivio Accardi Sanfilippo, designed for her one-woman show at the Fondazione Volume! in Rome in 2008. The room closes with Carla Accardi’s last two paintings, Posting the Mysteries and Inverted Order, painted shortly before her death.

CATALOGUE

The exhibition is accompanied by a publication that is at once the exhibition catalogue and a tool for exploring the artist’s work in greater depth.

The volume (available in both Italian and English), published by Quodlibet, includes not only colour plates of the artworks on display and essays by the curators, but also an exhaustive anthology of the critical literature devoted to Carla Accardi from 1950 to the day she died. The editorial project not only makes available a vast mass of historical material now translated into English, it also reflects a desire to transform the celebration of this centenary into a festival, inviting all those who have offered reflected on Carla Accardi’s work over the years and provided new interpretations of it to take part.

The anthology includes essays by: Umbro Apollonio, Giuseppe Appella, Luca Massimo Barbero, Lorenzo Benedetti, Achille Bonito Oliva, Vanni Bramanti, Marianne Brouwer, Palma Bucarelli, Maurizio Calvesi, Giovanni Carandente, Massimo Carboni, Germano Celant, Laura Cherubini, Stefano Chiodi, Bruno Corà, Enrico Crispolti, Fabrizio D’Amico, Giovanna Dalla Chiesa, Gillo Dorfles, Danilo Eccher, Maurizio Fagiolo Dell’Arco, Ida Gianelli, Walter Guadagnini, Flaminio Gualdoni, Udo Kultermann, Corrado Levi, Carla Lonzi, Toni Maraini, Murilo Mendes, Filiberto Menna, Susanne Pfleger, Daniele Pieroni, Elena Pontiggia, Pierre Restany, Annemarie Sauzeau Boetti, Michel Tapié, Giulio Turcato, Hans Ulrich Obrist, Lionello Venturi, Giorgio Verzotti, Cesare Vivaldi, Marisa Volpi, Valentino Zeichen and Adachiara Zevi.

PUBLIC PROGRAMME

The exhibition is accompanied by a full programme of collateral events, some of them focusing on the poetry of which the artist was an enthusiastic reader.

A BRIEF BIOGRAPHY

Carla Accardi was born in Trapani in 1924.

After gaining her classical and artistic school-leaving certificate, she enrolled at the Accademie di Belle Arti in Palermo and Florence. She settled in Rome in 1946 with the painter Antonio Sanfilippo, whom she married in 1949. In 1947 she signed the manifesto published in the first edition of the magazine “Forma”. In those years she explored abstraction with the aim of bringing Italian visual culture up to date.

She held her first one-woman show, introduced by Giulio Turcato, at the gallery/bookshop L’Age d’Or in Rome in 1950. She subsequently developed her own original artistic vocabulary focusing on black and white drawn marks, with which she played a leading role in forging informal art. Michel Tapié, one of the chief critics and promoters of this research, urged her to show her work at numerous international exhibitions.

She returned to the use of colour in the early 1960s, developing works hingeing on the dynamics of form, colour and perception. In the mid-60s she experimented with new supports and pigments for her painting. She used coloured and fluorescent varnishes that she applied onto transparent plastic supports (sicofoil), either rolled up (Rolls) or assembled. She was one of the first to confer a spatial dimension on her painting with her Tents.

In the course of the 1970s she worked on reiterated geometrical patterns and produced installations, some of which are associated with her short but significant militancy as a feminist. In the 1980s she went back to using canvas, but her style evolved yet further toward drawn marks and innovative chromatic juxtapositions.

She showed at the Venice Biennale in 1964, 1976, 1978, 1988, 1993 and 2011, and her work was included in an exhibition entitled The milk of dreams at the last edition of the Biennale in 2022. It was also shown at such major international retrospectives as: Italian Art in the XXth Century, Royal Academy, London 1989; The Italian Metamorphosis 1943-1968, Guggenheim Museum, New York

1994; Minimalia, P.S.1, New York (Venice and Rome), 1999; Wack! Art and the Feminist Revolution, MOCA, Los Angeles, 2007; Vita Nuova. Nouveaux enjeux de l’art en Italie 1960-1975, Musée d’Art Moderne et d’Art Contemporain, Nice, 2022.

One-woman shows of her work have been hosted in recent decades by such leading public institutions as: Castello Rivoli, Museo d’arte contemporanea, Rivoli, 1994; Kunstverein, Ludwigshafen-am-Rhein, 1995; P.S.1, New York, 2001; Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, Paris, 2002; MACRO, Rome, 2004; and Marta Herford Museum Zentrum Forum, Herford, 2007. One-woman shows of her work held after her death have included an exhibition at the Museo del Novecento in Milan in 2020 and another at the Maison La Roche in Paris in 2022.

The select bibliography includes, in particular, monographic volumes edited by Germano Celant, entitled Carla Accardi, Charta, Milan 1999; and Carla Accardi. La vita delle forme/The Life of Forms, Zerynthia, Rome - Silvana Editoriale, Cinisello Balsamo 2011.

Carla Accardi died in Rome in 2014.

INFORMATION

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TITLE

CARLA ACCARDI

DUE TO RUN

From 6 March to 9 June 2024

CURATED BY

Daniela Lancioni and Paola Bonani

PROMOTED BY

Rome the Capital City’s Cultural Affairs Department and Azienda Speciale Palaexpo

DEVISED, PRODUCED AND ORGANISED BY

Azienda Speciale Palaexpo

PRODUCED IN CONJUNCTION WITH

Archivio Accardi Sanfilippo

WITH THE SUPPORT OF

Fondazione Silvano Toti

MEDIA PARTNERS

Grandi Stazioni Retail Dimensione Suono Soft

TECHNICAL SPONSOR

CoopCulture

OUR GRATITUDE TO

Krumiri Rossi

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ADMISSION

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Admission free for children up to the age of 6.

Ticket valid for all current exhibitions.

FIRST WEDNESDAY OF EVERY MONTH Admission free for visitors under the age of 30 (from 2.00 pm to closing time).

ACCESSIBILITY

Palazzo Esposizioni Rome is accessible to visitors with reduced mobility or reduced sensory perception through three entrances devoid of architectural barriers.