Mauro Perucchetti

Mauro Perucchetti was born in January 1949 in Milan, Italy. Before turning to art full time, he worked in design and architecture and spent time in Rome, where he took classes in theatre studies. Around 2000 he sold his design and architecture practice and his home in Milan to dedicate himself entirely to sculpture.

His work draws on Pop, Conceptual, and Minimalist traditions, and he became known for pioneering the use of brightly colored polyurethane resin at a large scale, most famously in his Jelly Baby figures and Jelly Baby Family groupings, which he has said were prompted in part by public debate around cloning and consumer culture. His public installation Modern Heroes, featuring life-size figures inspired by comic-book iconography, was sited in West Hollywood near the Pacific Design Center and MOCA. He lives and works in London, where his wife, Lorena Perucchetti, works in public relations and helps promote his career internationally.

Writing for Halcyon Gallery, critic Elspeth Moncrieff has praised Perucchetti's pioneering use of resin and described his sculpture as bright, clean, and of its time, while critic Edward Lucie-Smith has pointed to the pointed social commentary embedded in his work. In Los Angeles, critic Peter Frank has written about the Modern Heroes installation as a reworking of heroic, pedestal-bound figuration to foreground women. The consistent thread across this criticism is that Perucchetti's polished, pop-colored surfaces carry an argument, about consumer culture, cloning, gender, or luxury, underneath their immediate visual appeal.

Perucchetti's clearest auction benchmark is Jelly Baby Family 1.3 (2022), which sold at Phillips's New Now sale in New York in late September 2023 for USD 228,600, reported by the artist's own site as roughly five times the pre-sale estimate. Phillips also noted a prior Perucchetti result in its review of its Spring 2020 season, though the price for that earlier sale is not confirmed in available sources. His secondary market is thin relative to his public profile: most of his visibility comes from gallery exhibitions and large public installations rather than a deep or frequent auction history, so any single result should be read with that context in mind.

There is no catalogue raisonne for Perucchetti, and authentication runs through the artist's studio and his current galleries, Alon Zakaim Fine Art in London and Anima Gallery in Doha, rather than through a formal certification body. His auction record is limited to a small number of confirmed results, so collectors should weigh any single sale price carefully rather than treat it as a stable trend line. His strongest signals of durability are institutional and public, including holdings associated with the Wellcome Trust, the Gateway Foundation, and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, and long-running public placements of the Jelly Babies in London and Paris.