MICHELANGELO PERGHEM GELMI 1911 - 1992

Drawing, in its various forms, has always been one of the greater passions of Michelangelo Perghem Gelmi. He cultivated this love for all of his life, from his youth till his years of maturity. Pencils, charcoals, watercolours, felt-tip pens went along with him throughout his school and university career, his trips around Europe and to South America, the sadness of imprisonment and his expectations as emigrant in a new and colourful continent, the everyday life in his beloved Trento and his long voyages of discovery of millenary civilizations. They are very often real travel journals, reportages and impressions grasped while travelling by train or walking along the streets of a city. They are pictures of everyday life.

The “Drawings” gallery includes mostly snapshots of our most important towns and cities. The first “Caricatures” date back to his university days, while in the portraits of maturity you can perceive his ability to look deeply into the portrayed model and to depict his predominant distinctive feature: in the “Caricatures” gallery you can find some famous people of the Twentieth century, politicians from the Sixties and Seventies, representatives of the Trentino cultural setting and also three tennis players of the Seventies.

The “Imprisonment” gallery includes a short selection from the 125 drawings of the book “From Cannes to Tarnopol”, (1975, Manfrini Publishing House, Calliano, Trento), a book about his imprisonment days from 8 September to 8 December 1943, printed in 1,000 numbered copies. In the book, below the drawings, there are the comments of Piero Baggini, a fellow prisoner. In the 2005 exhibition “Artists from Trentino in the two World Wars. Suffering and creativity” (see from 1992), new drawings from the imprisonment days, including the period until June 1944, and some original drawings from the book “From Cannes to Tarnopol” were exhibited and published in the relevant catalogue. In the gallery dedicated to the “Applied Arts”, you can find some studies of advertising posters and design that Perghem worked on during his Turin period (1945-1947) and his Argentinian period (1948-1955).