Biography
Born in Trapani in 1924, after her classical high school diploma, in 1943 she obtained her artistic high school diploma as a privatist and then followed courses at the Academy of Fine Arts in Palermo and Florence. In 1946 she moved to Rome with the painter Antonio Sanfilippo, who a few years later became her husband. In the capital he attended the club of the Art Club and the Consagra studio where he confronted artists such as Attardi, Dorazio, Guerrini, Perilli and Turcato. With these adventure companions, he signed the Manifesto of the Forma 1 group in 1947. His exhibition curriculum of the 1940s boasts numerous group shows in Italy and abroad and in 1950 he held his first solo exhibition at the Galleria Numero in Florence. During the 1950s, Accardi developed his language gradually tending towards an abstraction essentially reduced to signs and black and white, close to the research conducted by the major artists of the informal. Michel Tapiè, critic and promoter of this artistic movement with a European dimension, invites her to participate in the various exhibitions curated by him in Italy and abroad between 1954 and 1959.
In the 1960s, by joining the Continuità group, there was a recovery of color in his works with references to metropolitan culture and the use of some optical effects. His artistic research is characterized by continuous experimentation that is radicalized in the use of transparent plastic supports that accentuate the nature of the painting as a luminous diaphragm. His participations in the Venice Biennale are also different: in 1964 and again in 1976 and 1978.
In the 1980s, with the recovery of the traditional oil on canvas technique, its language underwent a further change through the use of signs and chromatic juxtapositions. He still exhibits at the 1988 Venice Biennale and participates in the main historical exhibitions of Italian art of the twentieth century, including “The Italian Metamorphosis 1943-1968” at the Solomon R. Guggenheim museum in New York (1994). Appointed member of the Brera Academy in 1996, the following year she joined the Commission for the Venice Biennale as a councilor. His works are present in the collections of museums such as the National Gallery of Modern Art in Rome, the Museum of Contemporary Art of the Castello di Rivoli (Turin), the Civic Galleries of Modena and Bologna, the Royal Palace of Milan and the Museum civic of Turin. The artist dies in Rome on February 23, 2014.