Born in Sicily, artist Carla Accardi (1924-2014) lived and worked in Rome. Accardi’s groundbreaking exploration of the physicality of materials and the boundaries of space in her seminal sicofoil works – enamel painted on transparent plastic wrapped around stretcher bars – played a vital role in the Italian Post-War avant-garde. Together with her husband Antonio Sanfilippo and other artists such as Giulio Turcato, Piero Dorazio and Pietro Consagra, she formed the Marxist-inspired Gruppo Forma 1. In 1970, she co-founded the Rivolta Femminile group with fellow feminist activists Carla Lonzi and Elvira Banotti. Since her first solo exhibition in 1950, Accardi’s work has been featured in numerous solo shows worldwide, as well as multiple presentations at the Venice Biennale. Important retrospectives of her work were held at the Castello di Rivoli Museo di Arte Contemporanea, Torino (1994); Musee d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, Paris (2002); and MACRO Museo d’Arte Contemporanea Rome, Rome (2004). Accardi’s first solo exhibition in the United States was held at P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center (now MoMA PS1), New York (2001). Her art has been featured in numerous museum group exhibitions, including “Italian Art in the 20th Century” at the Royal Academy of Arts, London (1989); “The Italian Metamorphosis, 1943-68” at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York (1994-95); “Italics: Italian Art between Tradition and Revolution 1968-2008” at the Palazzo Grassi, Venice and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago (2008-2009). Sperone Westwater presented a solo exhibition of her work in 2005, which was followed by a 2006 exhibition pairing her work with that of Lucio Fontana.