Catalogue of the anthological exhibition which the Palazzo Esposizioni Roma dedicated to Carla Accardi (Trapani, 1924 - Rome, 2014) to mark the centenary of her birth, curated by Daniela Lancioni and Paola Bonani, and realised with the collaboration of the Archivio Accardi Sanfilippo and with the support of the Fondazione Silvano Toti.

A figure of unquestionable prominence, for over half a century Carla Accardi was a protagonist of Italian and international visual culture. Through her painting, continuously redefined by her radical choices, she made a major contribution to the birth and development of new ways of understanding the artwork, from the abstraction of the immediate post-War years to Informal, to Environment Painting and to an art marked by issues relating to feminism, right up to the renewed joie de vivre of her paintings from the 1980s or her large diptychs and triptychs of the 1990s and 2000s.
This volume has been conceived both as an exhibition catalogue and as a tool for in-depth exploration. The opening section features illustrations of the works in the exhibition. There follows the text by Daniela Lancioni, “For Carla Accardi, Notes on the Works in this Exhibition”, tracing a guided itinerary through the artist’s work. The second section of the volume consists of an extensive anthology of the critical literature dedicated to Accardi’s work from 1950 up until her passing, introduced by an essay by Paola Bonani, “Carla Accardi, a Survey of Critical Writings”, providing a general overview of these contributions and illustrating the interpretative trends that have emerged in recent years.

Among the contributors of the sixty-five texts that make up the critical anthology, republished here in full, feature Luca Massimo Barbero, Lorenzo Benedetti, Achille Bonito Oliva, Vanni Bramanti, Maurizio Calvesi, Giovanni Carandente, Germano Celant, Stefano Chiodi, Bruno Corà, Enrico Crispolti, Gillo Dorfles, Danilo Eccher, Maurizio Fagiolo Dell’Arco, Ida Gianelli, Udo Kultermann, Corrado Levi, Carla Lonzi, Toni Maraini, Daniele Pieroni, Pierre Restany, Annemarie Sauzeau Boetti, Michel Tapié, Giulio Turcato, Hans Ulrich Obrist, Lionello Venturi, Giorgio Verzotti, Marsa Volpi, Valentino Zeichen, Adachiara Zevi.

 
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