The Estorick Collection and Compton Verney have announced a landmark collaboration that will bring the first UK institutional presentation dedicated to pioneering Italian artist Carla Accardi to audiences across two venues in 2027.
Opening simultaneously from January to June 2027, the exhibitions will introduce British audiences to one of Italy’s most influential post-war artists, whose work played a pivotal role in the development of abstraction and feminist art, yet remains relatively little known in the UK.
Developed in close collaboration with the Accardi Estate, the project will span both institutions, bringing together significant loans and archival material to trace Accardi’s career from the late 1940s onwards. Together, the exhibitions will offer the most comprehensive presentation of her work ever staged in Britain, exploring her innovations in painting, spatial installation and her pioneering use of industrial materials.
Born in Trapani in 1924, Accardi emerged as one of the leading figures of post-war Italian art. In 1947, she became the only woman among the founding members of Forma 1, the Rome-based collective that sought to reconcile abstract art with Marxist thought in the aftermath of Fascism. More than two decades later, she co-founded the influential feminist collective Rivolta Femminile alongside critic and writer Carla Lonzi, helping shape a new generation of feminist artistic and political discourse in Italy.
Across the two exhibitions, visitors will encounter key works spanning Accardi’s six-decade career, examining her distinctive visual language of rhythmic signs, bold colour and abstraction, alongside her groundbreaking experiments with Sicofoil, a transparent industrial plastic she adopted during the 1960s to challenge traditional ideas of painting and create immersive environments that blurred the boundaries between artwork and architectural space.
The collaboration also reflects a growing international reassessment of Accardi’s contribution to twentieth-century art, positioning her not only as a leading figure of Italian abstraction but also as an artist whose practice anticipated many of the conversations around materiality, space and gender that continue to shape contemporary art today.
The exhibition at the Estorick Collection will be curated by Stella Bottai, while the presentation at Compton Verney will be curated by Kiera Blakey, Associate Curator at Compton Verney.
Estorick Collection: 20th January – 13th June 2027 estorickcollection.com
Compton Verney: 23rd January – 13th June 2027 comptonverney.org.uk
This project is supported by the Directorate-General for Contemporary Creativity of the Italian Ministry of Culture under the Italian Council program (14th edition, 2025), with the aim of promoting Italian contemporary art internationally.
