Achille Perilli
1927–2021 · Italian painter and sculptor associated with the Forma 1 group
Achille Perilli (Rome, 28 January 1927 – Orvieto, 16 October 2021) was an Italian painter and sculptor linked to postwar abstraction. He matters for his role in Italian abstract art after the Second World War.
He attended classical secondary school and took a degree in literature with a thesis on Giorgio de Chirico. After the war he co-founded, with Carla Accardi, Ugo Attardi, Pietro Consagra, Antonio Sanfilippo and Giulio Turcato, the group Forma 1, one of the centres of Roman abstraction.
He is regarded as a master of abstraction, and his work was shown at the Venice Biennale in 1952, 1958, 1962 and 1968. Between 1948 and 1986 he took part in the Rome Quadriennale five times, and in 1963–1964 he was included in the touring exhibition Peintures italiennes d'aujourd'hui, which visited Beirut, Damascus, Tehran, Ankara and Tunis.
In 1995 he became a member of the Accademia di San Luca, and in 1997 he received an award from the President of the Italian Republic, Oscar Luigi Scalfaro. He died in Orvieto in 2021.