Achille Perilli (Rome, 1927 – Orvieto, 2021) is one of the founding voices of postwar Italian abstraction. In 1947 he co-signed the manifesto of Forma 1 — alongside Accardi, Consagra, Dorazio, Sanfilippo and Turcato — the group that first argued for the compatibility of political commitment and abstract formal research in Italy.
His language evolved continuously while remaining coherent: from gestural painting in the 1950s to irregular geometric compositions in the 1960s and 70s, culminating in his personal theory of irrazionale geometrico — a synthesis in which form does not describe, but acts. He participated in the Venice Biennale in 1952, 1958, 1962 and in 1968 with a dedicated room, and in Documenta 2 in Kassel in 1959.
