Carla Accardi

Carla Accardi was born in Trapani, Italy in 1924. She would train as a painter at the Academia di Belle Arti in Florence. After moving to Rome in 1946, she would become part of the group Forma 1 and sign its manifesto. She attempted to revolutionize abstraction by combining geometric abstraction and gestural painting. In 1961, Accardi began to work with siccofoil, a transparent plastic which she would mount on a stretcher to then paint her geometric and gestural shapes on. These works on plastic would be celebrated at the 1976 Venice Biennale. She would return to work on canvas in the 1980s. She held her first U.S. solo exhibition at the P.S. 1 Contemporary Art Center (now MoMa PS1) in 2001. In 2002, her work was shown in a retrospective at the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris.