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Carla Accardi — Rossoviola
Carla Accardi

Rossoviola

1987

Rossoviola pulses with the exuberant chromatic energy that defined Carla Accardi's mature practice. Against the raw, visible weave of the canvas, biomorphic forms spiral and interlock across a field of vivid red, their curvilinear contours traced in electric teal blue. Lavender and violet shapes, striated with bold strokes of green, push forward from the pictorial surface while the exposed burlap texture anchors the composition in its material reality. The vinyl medium, which Accardi adopted from the 1960s onward, lends the colors an almost phosphorescent intensity, making each hue appear to emanate its own light rather than merely reflect it. The result is a surface that feels simultaneously spontaneous and rigorously considered, each mark both free and purposeful within the dense, rhythmic whole. The painting exemplifies Accardi's lifelong engagement with sign, gesture, and the expressive potential of non-representational form. A founding member of the Italian avant-garde collective Forma 1 in 1947, she spent decades developing a visual language that moved between structured abstraction and a more liberated, almost calligraphic freedom. By 1987, her work had arrived at a confident synthesis of these impulses, producing compositions in which repeated motifs generate a sense of organic growth and internal logic without resolving into legibility. Rossoviola participates in this tradition while demonstrating how Accardi could compress an enormous amount of visual intelligence into a compact format, the thirty centimeter square functioning as a concentrated field of energy rather than a diminutive work. The choice of vinyl on canvas also speaks to Accardi's sustained interest in the material properties of painting as a medium. Vinyl offered a flatness and luminosity unavailable in oil or acrylic, and she exploited these qualities to ensure that color relationships, rather than surface texture or impasto, carried the full weight of expression. Collectors approaching Rossoviola will find a work that rewards sustained looking, as the eye moves through the interlocked forms and discovers new spatial relationships and color harmonies with each pass. It is a painting that belongs to a distinguished body of late work produced by one of Italy's most significant postwar artists, an artist whose contribution to the history of abstraction continues to receive long overdue international recognition.

Medium
Vinyl on canvas

🔨 Auction Lot

Martini Studio d'Arte: Modern And Contemporary Art

June 10, 2026

Estimate: €20,000 to €25,000

Lot 73

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About this work

Carla Accardi, Rossoviola, 1987

Rossoviola pulses with the exuberant chromatic energy that defined Carla Accardi's mature practice. Against the raw, visible weave of the canvas, biomorphic forms spiral and interlock across a field of vivid red, their curvilinear contours traced in electric teal blue. Lavender and violet shapes, striated with bold strokes of green, push forward from the pictorial surface while the exposed burlap texture anchors the composition in its material reality. The vinyl medium, which Accardi adopted from the 1960s onward, lends the colors an almost phosphorescent intensity, making each hue appear to emanate its own light rather than merely reflect it. The result is a surface that feels simultaneously spontaneous and rigorously considered, each mark both free and purposeful within the dense, rhythmic whole. The painting exemplifies Accardi's lifelong engagement with sign, gesture, and the expressive potential of non-representational form. A founding member of the Italian avant-garde collective Forma 1 in 1947, she spent decades developing a visual language that moved between structured abstraction and a more liberated, almost calligraphic freedom. By 1987, her work had arrived at a confident synthesis of these impulses, producing compositions in which repeated motifs generate a sense of organic growth and internal logic without resolving into legibility. Rossoviola participates in this tradition while demonstrating how Accardi could compress an enormous amount of visual intelligence into a compact format, the thirty centimeter square functioning as a concentrated field of energy rather than a diminutive work. The choice of vinyl on canvas also speaks to Accardi's sustained interest in the material properties of painting as a medium. Vinyl offered a flatness and luminosity unavailable in oil or acrylic, and she exploited these qualities to ensure that color relationships, rather than surface texture or impasto, carried the full weight of expression. Collectors approaching Rossoviola will find a work that rewards sustained looking, as the eye moves through the interlocked forms and discovers new spatial relationships and color harmonies with each pass. It is a painting that belongs to a distinguished body of late work produced by one of Italy's most significant postwar artists, an artist whose contribution to the history of abstraction continues to receive long overdue international recognition.

Medium
Vinyl on canvas
Year
1987
Seen at
Martini Studio d'Arte

Related themes

Abstract Art, Avant Garde, Modernist, Mixed Media, Pattern And Rhythm, Post War Art, European Art, Large Scale Work, Italian Artist, Red And Violet, Non Representational, Chromatic Energy, Gestural Abstraction, Calligraphic Mark, Vinyl On Canvas, Sign And Gesture, Organic Forms, Female Artist, Vibrant Color, Biomorphic Forms, Textured Surface

More works by Carla Accardi

Collected by

Joshua Cohen