Rosa grigio grande 1973

Carla Accardi made this painting, Rosa grigio grande, with simple gestures and a limited palette of pink and grey paint. I imagine her in the studio, turning and repeating a small vocabulary of shapes, like notes in a musical scale, and a sense of rhythm emerges. There's something so satisfying about the handmade quality of it all. See how the grey triangles and semi-circles overlap the pink ground? It's not perfect, and that’s ok! These forms are in constant dialogue: maybe she made a form that wasn’t quite right and then adjusted it. The pink might be a glaze or wash, laid down as an initial layer of colour and then worked into. The whole process feels really intuitive, like she’s discovering the image as she goes. Accardi was part of a generation of women artists who were pushing the boundaries of abstraction. Painting for her wasn’t about perfection; it was about searching and finding new possibilities. In a way, artists are always talking to each other across time and space, inspiring one another to see the world anew.