Attilio Pierelli Biography
Attilio Pierelli (San Quirico, 1924 – Rome, 2 January 2013) was an Italian sculptor. At just twelve years old, he moved to Rome with his family, starting to work as an apprentice in various artisan workshops; and it will be among these that, specializing in the profession of dental technician (1939), he will increase and mature his innate ability to manipulate matter. Self-taught, juggling between study and work, Pierelli began to spontaneously approach sculptural art in the 1950s. His first works, dating back to 1958 and therefore to the period that the artist himself called Barlumi, were made up of the union-overlapping of ashlar glass sheets and sheets of glass wool. Driven by what he liked to define as "primitive intuitions", Pierelli managed to transform a pleasant pastime into a true creative necessity, coming into contact with the most important figures of the artistic environment, Roman and otherwise, of the time. Thus he met and frequented the intellectual Emilio Villa, the art critics Giulio Carlo Argan and Maurizio Fagiolo dell'Arco, the gallery owners Gaspero del Corso and Irene Brin and the historic director of the National Gallery of Modern Art in Rome Palma Bucarelli. Among the meetings that will have a significant impact on the historical-artistic path of Attilio Pierelli we also remember the one with the artist Lucio Fontana, the architect Carlo Scarpa and the furniture industrialist Dino Gavina, acquaintances that will allow him to understand the avant-garde reality of industrial design . In 1963, the first solo exhibition of the emerging sculptor Planches Aluminum was set up at the Galleria S. Marco in Rome, and in the same year he began making jewellery. In 1987 Pierelli founded the Dimensionalist International Artistic Movement in Rome: advanced interdisciplinary art with an exhibition at the Casino dell'Aurora Pallavicini in Rome, while continuing to participate in the most important national and international exhibitions of the moment: in 1990 he exhibited at the Galerie Landesgirokasse in Stuttgart and the following year at the Museum of Modern Art in Kyoto. In 1991 the sculptor purchased the ground floor of an ancient 16th century building in Bomarzo (VT) within which he decided to found, two years later, the Hypersculpture Museum, which will be part of the contemporary art museum network project promoted and directed by Professor Simonetta Lux's chair of History of Contemporary Art at the "La Sapienza" University of Rome and which will remain open until July 2012. In 1997 the artist made a donation to the University of Rome Tor Vergata and seven of its monumental sculptures are assigned to the various faculties of Economics, Engineering, Medicine and Surgery, Mathematical, Physical and Natural Sciences. At the beginning of 1998 he acquired the rights to the hypercube image through copyright registration. Attilio Pierelli died in Rome on 2 January 2013. Three years after his death, 20 of the over 100 works that formed the collection of the Hyperspace Sculpture Museum of Bomarzo were welcomed and exhibited in the evocative spaces of Villa Magherini Graziani in Celalba, in the municipality of San Giustino (PG). And this is how this precious collection finds, starting from 2016, its new "permanent home" and, in addition to enriching the contemporary historical and artistic heritage of the Umbria region, it will henceforth become the place dedicated to the knowledge of one of the artists most revolutionaries of the second half of the twentieth century.
