Birth Anniversary: Carla Accardi — October 9, 1924

Carla Accardi was born in Trapani on 9 October 1924. She trained at the academies of Palermo and Florence, moved to Rome in 1946 and, a year later, was the only woman among the founders of Forma 1, the group that put abstraction at the centre of Italian art after the war. In 1961 she began painting on sicofoil, a transparent plastic sheet, and took the results to the Venice Biennale of 1964.

Video: Maria Grazia Messina racconta Carla Accardi — Museo del Novecento, Milan.

Carla Accardi in her Rome studio, 1999. Photo: Mireille Hoster (Archivio Accardi Sanfilippo, Rome), CC0, via Wikimedia Commons.