Carla Badiali was born in Novedrate (Como) on November 9, 1907 to Ettore and Rosa Molteni. Her family soon moved to Saint’Etienne, France, where the artist attended elementary and middle school. She learned to paint from an early age at her father’s school and studied piano for eight years. Returning to Italy in 1922, she attended the Royal National Institute of Silk, drawing section, where she graduated in 1927, immediately finding employment as a fabric designer at the Balbis e Bari company, where she remained until 1931. In 1930 she began to frequent the studio of the painter Manlio Rho, where artists and architects met, such as Mario Radice and Giuseppe Terragni, and gradually Aldo Galli, Luigi Zuccoli, Franco Ciliberti, Cesare Cattaneo, Pietro Lingeri, Alberto Sartoris, Carla Prina and Alvaro Molteni were added. In 1932 she opened her own studio for fabric designs, which she ran with managerial flair until 1963 (with a suspension from 1943 to 1950). Between 1932 and 1933, the first paintings that we can define as abstract came out of her hands. In 1942 she participated in the XXIII International Art Exhibition La Biennale di Venezia, exhibiting three works in the Pavilion of Italian Futurism ordered by Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, where the abstract artists from Como were given ample space: with Carla Badiali, Radice, Rho, Aristide Bianchi, Cordelia Cattaneo, Carla Prina and Eligio Torno were present. The following year, with the same artists, with the exception of Cattaneo and Torno, she participated in the IV Quadriennale d’Arte Nazionale di Roma, again among the Futurists. In 1944, due to her support for the Resistance, while she was pregnant with her first child, she was taken prisoner by the Koch Gang and subsequently transferred to the San Vittore prison, from which she managed to escape thanks to the intervention of a small partisan formation. Between 1945 and 1948, her children Carlo, Pierpaolo and Paola were born: the weight of the family prevented her from dedicating much time to painting. In 1950, she reopened the fabric design studio that for years would serve the Como silk factories, but also large French brands such as Givenchy and Balmain. She slowly started painting again and with the definitive closure of the studio in 1963, her artistic activity found new energy. In 1966, as part of the XXXIII International Biennial Art Exhibition in Venice, a section was set up dedicated to the Aspects of early Italian abstract art Milan-Como 1930-1940, curated by Nello Ponente, which resumed and valorized the work of the only two groups of historical Italian abstract artists, the one from Como and the one active in the same historical Thirties around the Galleria del Milione. Carla Badiali was represented by a beautiful group of works executed between 1932 and 1938. In 1967 she held her first solo exhibition at the Galleria Cadario both in Milan and Rome. In various exhibitions in Italy dedicated to historical abstraction and in particular to that of Como (in 1969: Galleria Civica d’Arte Moderna in Monza; 1972: Galleria San Fedele in Milan; 1973: Galleria del Cavallino in Venice, Galleria Sant’Elia, Como, Galleria Il Nome, Vigevano) her presence has an excellent prominence. As well as at the X Quadriennale Nazionale d’Arte in Rome, in the exhibition Situazione dell’arte nonfigurativa curated by Nello Ponente. Personal exhibitions follow in Milan at Vismara Arte Contemporanea (1969), At the gallery Milano (1978), At the Galleria Arte Struktura 1984, In Como at the Serre Ratti (1975, 1976,1983), in Genoa at the Galleria Martini e Ronchetti (1978), in Vigevano at the gallery Il Nome. (1984) In 1980 she was included among the European avant-garde artists in the exhibition The Other Half of the Avant-garde 1910-1940 curated by Lea Vergine (Milan, Palazzo Reale; Stockholm, Kulturhuset), in 1982 in the section “Gli astratti tra idea e pratica” curated by Luciano Caramel as part of the exhibition The Thirties, Art and Culture in Italy (Milan, Palazzo Reale) and then found a European showcase first in the large exhibition The Europe of the Rationalists – Painting, Sculpture, Architecture in the Thirties proposed in her city in the spaces of the new Pinacoteca Civica and then in a large exhibition on Futurism and Rationalism that was presented first at the Museum Fridericianum in Kassel in Germany and then at the IVAM-Instituto Valenciano de Arte Moderno Centre Julio Gonzalez in Valencia in Spain (1990). In 1990 the city of Como dedicated an exhibition to her historical works at the Pinacoteca Civica curated by Giovanni Anzani and an exhibition reserved for the works of the 1960s and 1980s was proposed, shortly before her death on 7 February 1992, at the Valente Arte Contemporanea gallery in Finale Ligure while an exhibition was being prepared which, at the Nuova Galleria Carini in Milan, would compare her work with that of Manlio Rho.