Rating and value of paintings by Carla Accardi

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Artist's rating and value

Italian artist Carla Accardi won over the critics, dealers and art collectors of her day. Since then, the artist's work has established itself as one of the art market's best-sellers.

From the 2010s onwards, his stock exploded and showed steady growth, particularly for his works from the 50s onwards.

Carla Accardi's works sell for between €50 and €280,000. In 2023, an oil on canvas dating from 1957 entitled Caséine sold for €280,000, whereas its estimate was between €200,000 and €300,000.

Order of value from the most basic to the most prestigious

The artist's works and style

In Carla Accardi's work, the questioning of traditional painting codes is accentuated by the introduction of sicofoil, a translucent material that disrupts the surface itself.

Hand-drawn signs, often stripped of rigid outlines, stretch like weightless patterns, vibrating between opacity and transparency.

These lines, by turns sinuous and broken, thick and evanescent, seem intent on exploring all possible combinations, playing on superimpositions and irregular rhythms.

The support is no longer simply a receptacle, but becomes an active space where textures and reliefs emerge as light passes through or reflects the material.

In this exploration, the sign loses all descriptive function. It no longer coincides with the narrative forms for which it was originally intended, but devotes itself to redefining a purely visual space, varying densities and intervals in a shifting continuity.

Colors, applied in vivid flat tints or subtle touches, are no longer used to represent objects. Stripped of their symbolic or decorative role, they become players in a game of appearances and disappearances, constantly modulating the viewer's perception.

This chromatic vocabulary, freed from convention, interacts with sicofoil to produce unexpected optical effects, sometimes verging on luminous vibration.

In this reconfiguration of pictorial language, Accardi reaches a climax where pictorial space seems to dissolve into immaterial materiality.

The surface, penetrated by light, no longer knows contours or clear boundaries, but unfolds like an infinite field where each element is in constant dialogue with the others.

This technical and aesthetic evolution, far from being a mere detail, reflects a profound reversal: for Accardi, painting ceases to be representation and becomes exploration, the invention of a new space where the visible and invisible merge.

The life of Carla Accardi

Carla Accardi, born in 1924 in Trapani, Sicily, began her artistic career at the Palermo Academy of Fine Arts, before continuing her studies in Florence.

In Rome, where she settled in 1946, her career took place against a backdrop of intellectual and artistic effervescence, marked by the emergence of new avant-gardes.

In 1947, she co-founded the Forma 1 group with other artists keen to combine geometric abstraction with Marxist ideals.

This inaugural moment, which might seem a simple adherence to a collective aesthetic, already marks the beginning of a singular path.

From then on, his painting gradually freed itself from the rigid frameworks of strict geometry to explore a language of signs in which color, often bright, became an autonomous plastic force.

This evolution reflects a growing desire to escape conventions, both pictorial and social, in an Italy still deeply marked by patriarchal values.

From the 1960s onwards, the introduction of sicofoil, a translucent, flexible material, marked a decisive turning point in his approach: traditional supports gave way to research in which space, light and transparency became integral elements of the work.

Far from limiting himself to formal experimentation, this radical choice inscribes his work in a direct relationship with the social and cultural transformations of his time, affirming a gesture of independence and innovation.

Focus on Rotoli, Carla Accardi, 1965

In Rotoli (1965), Carla Accardi's work frees itself from traditional painting conventions, making matter and light the real subjects of the work.

On these rolls of sicofoil, a supple, translucent material, she deploys abstract forms that are neither entirely lines nor entirely signs, but a dynamic between the two, a kind of tension without resolution.

The texture of sicofoil, itself almost invisible, becomes a support for traces that have no definition other than that which we attribute to them, and at the same time a claim to presence, where every movement inscribed in the material seems both suspended and floating.

The transparency of sicofoil not only eclipses the traditional figures of painting: it also dilutes the boundaries between the world of art and that of the viewer.

Each fold, each drawn line seems to invite the viewer to move, to experience constant engagement. The work is no longer a figure of passive contemplation, but an interactive space, where the viewer himself becomes the principal actor in the reading of the form.

The structure of the strips, often suspended in space, refuses to be limited to a frame or a fixed image: they are the projection of a pictorial language in which movement, light and shadow take their place alongside gesture.

Like traces of linear movement unfurled in space, these scrolls seem to seek their own direction, drifting between extremes of tension and fluidity.

The absence of a traditional background or rigid composition, typical of classical painting formats, strips the work of any narrative or geometric representation, leaving it to transform and metamorphose through the light that passes through them and the space they occupy.

At every moment, the work redefines itself according to the angle from which it is viewed, like a variation of light and shadow that has no other purpose than to exist in the moment.

The range of colors, from bright hues to dazzling whites, revives the notion of dynamics that traditional painting tended to eradicate.

Accardi's work does not seek to reproduce a form of reality or capture a fixed emotion, but to liberate painting from its initial role, turning it into a purely sensory exploration.

This radical gesture is all the more significant in that it comes at a time when the codes of abstract art and minimalism seemed to have frozen a form of aesthetic heritage.

But Accardi, by breaking with these norms, imposes a new reading of abstraction, one that can no longer be defined by shapes or geometry alone, but by an intimate relationship with space and matter itself.

This work, both radical and poetic, places the work in perpetual motion, a never-ending search for identity, both for the artist and the viewer.

Carla Accardi's imprint on her era

Carla Accardi's mark on her era is clearly visible in her choice of materials and forms, which become the terrain for a visual exploration as radical as it is poetic.

From her earliest works, the artist distinguished herself by rejecting the figurative conventions that dominated the Italian art scene of the 1950s. By replacing traditional canvas with materials such as sicofoil, she inaugurated an innovative gesture that traverses and deconstructs pictorial space.

This gesture is not limited to a simple search for formal novelty, but appears as an act of subversion.

In this, Accardi's work goes far beyond individual expression, responding to a broader need to renew the visual language of her time, a language that she believes cannot be limited by fixed formats or conventions.

In this context, the artist not only questions painting as a discipline, but also art's relationship with its time. As Italy rebuilds after the Second World War, artists are called upon to reinvent the meaning of art in a changing society.

Accardi's approach plays a central role in this reflection, proposing an alternative to the fixed and overly conventional approaches of his contemporaries - in the same vein as Bernar Venet, Gérard Schneider or Jacques Doucet.

Accardi's works, often characterized by abstract lines and deliberately non-figurative compositions, demonstrate this desire to free painting from its traditional constraints.

By moving away from classical forms and favoring materials that overturn the very perception of the work, she creates a dialogue between art and its public, a dialogue in which matter and form become the real protagonists of a broader discourse on the artist's place in a changing society.

Through this approach, Accardi's imprint on his era becomes indisputable. His work is not simply part of an aesthetic framework, but stands out as an act of rupture, a way of redefining the role of the artist in an era where everything seems to be reinvented.

The artist, far from being satisfied with the canons inherited from the past, creates an art that does not allow itself to be locked into any fixed form. As such, Accardi does not seek to imitate his contemporaries, but to offer them a new path, one that opens up infinite possibilities for transformation, freedom and expression.

This indelible, deeply personal imprint makes the artist a leading figure of his time, the embodiment of a constant reinvention of artistic language.

His signature

Carla Accardi's works are not all signed.

An example of his signature can be seen in the drawing below.

Appraising your property

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A member of our team of experts and certified auctioneers will contact you to provide an estimate of the market value of your work.

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