Carla Accardi

(Italian, 1924-2014)

Argento turchese
1964

Footnotes

This work is registered in the Archivio Accardi Sanfilippo, Rome, under no. 408, and is accompanied by a photo-certificate of authenticity.

Provenance
Acquired directly from the artist by the present owner circa 1970


A burst of animated colour and activity, Carla Accardi's Argento turchese of 1964 represents a prime example of Italy's most celebrated female artist at her inventive best. Created at a crucial moment in her career when Accardi was exploring the potential of a new, brighter palette for the first time, this work embodies all that is great about her distinctive style. Featuring a network of delicately inscribed 'signs' placed across a grid of what appears to be overlapping painted panels, this sizeable canvas presents us with an intriguing enigma, an enticing cryptography of symbols which seem almost, but not quite, recognisable. Its vivid tones, also referenced in the work's title (which translates into English as simply 'Silver turquoise') evidently adds to its unassailable allure. Like tablets bearing the traces of some undecipherable ancient language, Argento turchese tempts us with the promise of profound, long-lost truths; that the delivery on this promise remains tantalisingly out of reach renders it all the more absorbing.

The roots of Accardi's avant-garde abstraction can be located in her involvement in the group known as Forma 1, an artistic movement which she co-founded in 1947 with seven other Italian artists including Piero Dorazio, Achilli Perilli and Giulio Turcato. Exploring the dialogues between art and politics, abstraction and realism, the members of Forma 1 soon attracted the attention of critics, curators and collectors around the world, and by the time it folded in 1951, Accardi was well on the way to establishing her own visual vocabulary. Later in the 1950s Accardi's work caught the eye of influential curator Michel Tapié, who invited her to exhibit in Paris alongside artistic heavyweights including Sam Francis, Serge Poliakoff and Alberto Burri. She developed a friendship with Lucio Fontana, each visiting the other's studios and expressing admiration for the other's work. Accardi herself has acknowledged the influence of Hans Hartung on her own painting during this period. Moving in such circles, it is surely no surprise that when she came to produce Argento turchese in 1964, the artist was not only painting at the peak of her talents, but was also reaping the benefits of an international profile and the numerous possibilities for exhibiting her work around the globe that it inevitably offered.

Throughout the rest of her long career, Carla Accardi continually strived to innovate, to build and refine a unique approach to abstract art. Over a period of many decades she developed and advanced an idiosyncratic visual language all of her own, one which often features the highly individual use of the apparently symbolic signs that we witness in this painting. Reminiscent perhaps of cuneiform script carefully pressed into clay tablets of ancient Sumeria, or of classical Greek texts scratched onto stone, these letters repeat and adapt as they move across the canvas, creating an elaborate interplay of form and line. The materials that we encounter in this work also seem to hark back to the past; tempera was commonly used in pre-Renaissance art before being replaced by oil paint around 1500, while casein has been employed by artists since ancient Egyptian times. With its palette of startling blue and glittering silver, a colour rarely used by Accardi seen to its best advantage in Argento turchese, this is a work of art which also displays all of the vigour of Italy's Post–War artistic revolution.

During the 1970s Carla Accardi became closely associated with the feminist movement, forming a group known as Rivolta Femminile ('Female Revolt') with art critic and political activist Carla Lonzi in order to promote the work of creative women. Later Accardi tended to distance herself from such notions of the 'female artist', preferring to view herself more as simply an 'artist' without any reference to gender. Despite this change of heart, her role as a powerful and influential woman in the otherwise rather macho world of Italian avant-garde art surely deserves credit. Ultimately, however, it is her unmistakable talent which has won her widespread acclaim. Over the last three decades her work has been celebrated in solo shows at many important institutions, including the Kunstmuseum in Bonn in 1999, the P.S. 1 Contemporary Art Center in New York in 2001, the Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville in Paris in 2002 and the MACRO Museo d'Arte Contemporanea in Rome in 2004.

Argento turchese from 1964 will ever remain an unsolved puzzle. Since Accardi never felt the need to fully explain the meaning of these fascinating hieroglyphs, this delicate, sparkling pseudo-script which decorates the luminous canvas that we see before us, we must make our own conclusions, drawing from the depths of our own subconscious in our gripping yet futile attempts to crack the code. Encompassing both the highly personal and the universal, Argento turchese of 1964 epitomises Carla Accardi's artful fusion of the mysteriously ancient and the unflinchingly modern, the inherently political with the seductively aesthetic. Light, bright and resolute, this painting effectively demonstrates the artist's classic "harmonious beauty" in all of its dazzling glory.