ROME.- Among latest acquisitions, Ottocento Art Gallery offers a masterpiece by Futurist Umberto Peschi (Macerata 1912 – 1992), an astonishing wooden sculpture which show an incredible figure of parachutist.

A sculptor from Macerata, Peschi turned his plastic research from the figurative front of the Forties to the abstract modular. After attending the Royal School of Apprenticeship, and the Art Institute of Macerata, in 1937 he moved to Rome where with Bruno Tano and Sante Monachesi he had contacts with various Futurist groups, becoming part of it. In the Marche region, he was one of the animators of the historic Boccioni Group, which gathered in itself a generation of futurists from Macerata and which was one of the essential ingredients not only for the so-called “Second Italian Futurism”, but for the critical study and historical re-evaluation of the entire Futurist movement. Present in all the editions of the Quadriennale di Roma held from 1939 to 1959, in 1940 Peschi participates in the XXII edition of the Venice Biennale, where he exhibits the well-known “Aeroritratto d’aviatore”, an all-round wood that the scenographer Dante Ferretti, in virtue of its great symbolic strength, chose for the scenography of the film “Salò or the one hundred and twenty days of Sodom” directed by Pier Paolo Pasolini in 1975.

As interpreter of the Aerosculpture, Peschi participated in the Venice Biennale in 1942, with two wooden bas-reliefs, “Paratrooper” and “Oasis of Peace”, works that highlight his exceptional technical mastery combined with an equally powerful poetic imagination. In particular, the “Paratrooper”, the work presented here, is to be considered the masterpiece of the Futurist production of the sculptor from Macerata: in the sculpted high stele covered by a spiral band – a view of the city seen from above – stands the monumental figure of paratrooper, authentic modernist idol able to join the earth with the sky.

Present at most of the Italian trade union exhibitions and the Futurist events between 1937 and 1943, Peschi was in contact with Prampolini, Balla, Depero and Licini. Today, after numerous exhibitions and publications dedicated to him, he is recognized as one of the most important sculptors of the Italian “Second Futurism”.