Partners & Mucciaccia presents Carla Accardi (1924-2014), one of the protagonists of Italian art since the late 1940s. Her work, ranging from painting to installation, focuses on the interaction between sign, surface, light and color.“

Life is not always easy or beautiful. Only in knowing the night do I know the day, and only in knowing cold do I know heat. I express these contrasts in my painting by superimposing black on white, or by placing a circle next to a contrasting shape. …I simply paint a symbolic portrait of life as I see it, with its struggles, its joys, its miseries and its defeats…”

(Accardi in conversation with H. Lester Cooke, 1955).

In the 1950s, Accardi produces a series of bichrome works, characteristic of her positive/negative series, resulting in her black and white paintings. She creates a sign and repeats it over and over again, a sense of continuity, creating a remarkably familiar calligraphy.

In the 1960s, vibrant colors are introduced in her palette. The relationship between sign and color determines the role of motion and spatial function. Influenced by her interest in film and advertising, she begins using fluorescent colors as a way to embrace the social, rather than as a reference to consumer products, like for many of her fellow Pop artists.