One of the most original and intense interpreters of the Italian art scene in the second half of the 20th century, Tancredi Parmeggiani (Feltre 1927 – Rome 1964) was the only artist, after Jackson Pollock, with whom Peggy Guggenheim signed a contract, promoting his work, making it known to the great museums and collectors overseas and organising a number of exhibitions, such as the one in 1954 at Palazzo Venier dei Leoni.
In her autobiography, the American collector defined the artist as one of her “protégés”, recalling his evolutions in style: from the neoplasticist geometrism of Theo van Doesburg to the action painting of Jackson Pollock, up to the decisive transition to large format on the advice of James Sweeney.
A bursting creative and emotional production through the short but dazzling parabola of this great interpreter of post World War II art, starting from a purely abstract research, linked to the fragmentation of the sign, carried out by the artist from Feltre during the 1950s, which in the early 1960s evolved into an existential and political key, with a production of exceptional creative vigour and dramatic euphoria.
“Homage to Kandinski, Klee, Picasso and Osvaldo Licini. Revelation”, is a tempera on paper applied on canvas dated 1960 (lot 24, estimate €50,000 – €70,000) – to be auctioned in the next Modern and Contemporary Art auction to be held in Milan on 5 July 2022 – that makes manifest the still intact fascination of his painting, which is deeply rooted in a convulsive gestuality of rapid and infinitesimal signs, radiating in the painted space with cosmogonies, constellations, contractions, deflagrations and expansions.