Tancredi Parmeggiani
Tancredi Parmeggiani was born in Feltre on 25th September 1927. After having spent his childhood at Belluno where he attended high school into the Silesians’ college, in 1943 he interrupted the classical studies to sign in the Academy of Fine Arts of Venice, following the classes of the Free School of nude held by Armando Pizzinato. During this period he met and became friend of Emilio Vedova. In 1946 he left for Paris where he came to know the vanguards of the first half of the century. The following year he came back to Italy and he worked and lived between Feltre and Venice. Here in 1949 he presented his first personal exhibition supervised by Virgilio Guidi at the Gallery Sandri. In 1950 he moved to Rome, where he started to collaborate with the group Age d’Or and in 1951 he participated to the First Exhibition of the Italian Abstract Art at the Gallery of Modern Art in Rome. Subsequently he met Peggy Guggenheim, who soon became one of the key figures in the promotion of the artist's works both in Italy and abroad: the collector, as well as providing him with a study, organized a donation campaign of works of art by Tancredi in the most famous world museums including the MoMA in New York.
The artist's path is firmly anchored to a radical abstraction, now entrusted to the convulsive gestures of a writing of rapid and infinitesimal signs, now to the weaving of more or less regular warps saturating the surface of the canvas, in which the underlying trace must be identified in the artist's interest in Piet Mondrian's 'grids': dynamic compositions, animated by a convulsive and bumpy drafting and by the use of primary colors or a pasty material bundled in rectangular inlays, on which a double memory seems to be grafted, that of the tiles of Venetian mosaics and that of the French Neo-Impressionists and Italian Divisionists.
Tancredi could now be considered one of the most successful artists of his time and perhaps this was also one of the components that precipitated him to continuous nervous breakdowns and moods: the great sensitivity of the artist in contrast with the enormous media exposure ferociously undermined his nerves that to commit suicide by jumping into the waters of the Tiber, right in the days of his thirty-eighth birthday.
Tancredi Parmeggiani was born in Feltre on 25th September 1927. After having spent his childhood at Belluno where he attended high school into the Silesians’ college, in 1943 he interrupted the classical studies to sign in the Academy of Fine Arts of Venice, following the classes of the Free School of nude held by Armando Pizzinato. During this period he met and became friend of Emilio Vedova. In 1946 he left for Paris where he came to know the vanguards of the first half of the century. The following year he came back to Italy and he worked and lived between Feltre and Venice. Here in 1949 he presented his first personal exhibition supervised by Virgilio Guidi at the Gallery Sandri. In 1950 he moved to Rome, where he started to collaborate with the group Age d’Or and in 1951 he participated to the First Exhibition of the Italian Abstract Art at the Gallery of Modern Art in Rome. Subsequently he met Peggy Guggenheim, who soon became one of the key figures in the promotion of the artist's works both in Italy and abroad: the collector, as well as providing him with a study, organized a donation campaign of works of art by Tancredi in the most famous world museums including the MoMA in New York.
The artist's path is firmly anchored to a radical abstraction, now entrusted to the convulsive gestures of a writing of rapid and infinitesimal signs, now to the weaving of more or less regular warps saturating the surface of the canvas, in which the underlying trace must be identified in the artist's interest in Piet Mondrian's 'grids': dynamic compositions, animated by a convulsive and bumpy drafting and by the use of primary colors or a pasty material bundled in rectangular inlays, on which a double memory seems to be grafted, that of the tiles of Venetian mosaics and that of the French Neo-Impressionists and Italian Divisionists.
Tancredi could now be considered one of the most successful artists of his time and perhaps this was also one of the components that precipitated him to continuous nervous breakdowns and moods: the great sensitivity of the artist in contrast with the enormous media exposure ferociously undermined his nerves that to commit suicide by jumping into the waters of the Tiber, right in the days of his thirty-eighth birthday.