Carla Accardi
The Seventies: Lenzuoli

28/04 - 29/10/2023

Carla Accardi
The Seventies: Lenzuoli

curated by Chiara Squarcina and Pier Paolo Pancotto
in collaboration with Archivio Accardi Sanfilippo

Museo Correr – Sala delle Quattro Porte, Venice

28 April – 29 October 2023
Open day 27 Aprile 10 am-6 pm

Carla Accardi (Trapani, 1924 – Rome, 2014) was one of the protagonists of Italian abstraction after the Second World War. She participates in the founding of the Forma group in Rome in 1947 and soon becomes the interpreter of sign based research which, thanks also to the attention of Michel Tapié and Pierre Restany, figures in group and personal exhibitions set up in important avant-garde galleries in Paris, Rome, Osaka, Pittsburgh, Tokyo, Düsseldorf, and London. In the 1960s she introduced the use of a new transparent plastic material, sicofoil, into her work, abandoning tempera in favor of colored and fluorescent paints, and opening her research to optical and environmental effects.

The project for Museo Correr, curated by Pier Paolo Pancotto in collaboration with the Accardi Sanfilippo Archive, presents a small selection of works from the 1970s placed in dialogue with the historical spaces of the museum. It is a limited number of works – Lenzuoli – rarely visible in public, attributable to reflections on issues related to the Women’s Revolt of which she was then the promoter together with Carla Lonzi and Elvira Banotti. Photographs and various documents also reaffirm Carla Accardi’s bond with Venice, including a 1952 shot taken at the time of her personal exhibition at the Galleria del Cavallino, on the occasion of a visit to the Peggy Guggenheim collection, together with her husband, the artist Antonio Sanfilippo, and Tancredi Parmeggiani.