Enrico Accatino was born in the port city of Genoa in 1920 to Piemontese parents. This painter, sculptor and designer graduated from the Rome Fine Arts Academy and in 1947, after the Second World War, transferred to Paris. There, during the inspiring post-war years he mixed with artists such as Severini, Giacometti, Laurens Pignon and Manessier.

Accatino's work from 1940 to 1957 is characterized by a figurative tendency, inspired by social themes, one which distinguished him from the ideological - political realism reigning in Italy in that period. A strong human sentiment, directed towards redemption from pain and misery, is expressed by an essential constructionist symbolism (Fisherman, Tuna fishing, Mothers cycles). After a decade in Paris, he won a scholarship from the Belgian American Education Foundation which took him to Belgium and Holland in 1956. The first of his aniconic paintings, strongly geometrical works sustained by controlled colour vibrations (grays, whites, blacks, rusty browns and blues) were created in the second half of the fifties. In this period he began to investigate circularity, the theme which was to imprint all of his later graphic, painted and 3-dimensional works as circles, disks, ellipses …with all of their multiple and intersecting meanings. "The Eclipse" (1959) offers a unique point of view on what may be defined as the "praise of shadow", while "The Great Ring" (bronze, 1970) conducts us into the passionate "research of light" of Accatino poetry. A dedicated art student and theorist, Accatino has often deeply researched fundamental aesthetic categories, such as colour, abstraction and 3-dimensionalism.
A strenuous supporter of a new Italian culture tied to textiles, from 1966 he was intensely dedicated to the re-launching of tapestry as language, creating bi- and tri-dimensional solutions such his double faced diaphragm tapestries, plastic elements suspended in space.

During his long and intense artistic career he attained important national and international recognition, and many of his works are conserved in museums and private collections in Italy and abroad. From 1960 to 1964 he was responsible for the planning of a new method of teaching art, through hundreds of television transmissions (RAI - Radio Televisione Italiana). He also published numerous and important texts on Visual Arts and the History of Art and held conferences and courses for professors and principals in art instruction.

In 1980, nominated by the Ministry of Public Education, Enrico Accatino was awarded a gold medal by the President of the Italian Republic for "Benemerito della Scuola, della Cultura e dell'Arte". Currently Accatino lives and works in Rome.