Abstraction first emerged in Italian art around 1910, when painters belonging to the Futurist school began developing their studies of light and motion in bold new directions, depicting ‘the essential force lines of speed’ as brightly-coloured arcs and thrusting, jagged forms.
In Astratto explored fifty years of innovation in Italian abstraction, and presented a comprehensive survey of the myriad approaches to the subject that emerged during the key period from 1930 to 1980.
Milan’s Ramo Collection comprises nearly 600 works on paper by artists belonging to some of the most important movements and tendencies in twentieth-century Italian art. This exhibition – the first to present a selection of drawings from the Collection outside Italy – explored the discipline as more than just a ‘preparatory’ activity, considering it as an art form in its own right.
Achille Perilli (b.1927) first rose to prominence as a member of Rome's Forma 1 group, which was active from 1947 to 1951. Its artists were the first in post-war Italy to take an interest in abstraction, opposing their work to the realist and symbolist art that they rejected as decadent. This small selection of paintings focused on the artist's later works, dating from the 1960s to the 1980s, depicting angular and decentralized structures.