Piero Dorazio

Piero Dorazio was born in Rome in 1927. He trained in Paris where he met Henri Matisse, Joan Miró, Le Corbusier, Braque, and Hans Arp, and in New York, where he lived and frequented Yves Klein, Marcel Duchamp, and Rothko. In Italy, together with Achille Perilli and Giovanni Guerrini, he opened “L'Age d'Or,” a gallery-bookshop specializing in avant-garde magazines and books and an exhibition venue for abstract art.

In 1947, his expressive research continued with the abstract artists of the Forma 1 Group. Carla Accardi, Pietro Consagra, Antonio Sanfilippo, and Giulio Turcato wanted to free art from its psychological or realistic dimension in favor of a new language based on the abstraction of the sign, in line with international artistic experiences. Piero Dorazio was one of the leading representatives of European abstract art. His works are characterized by the use of lines, geometries, and colors, which were all elements that would become his stylistic signature, thanks also to the careful study and division of space.

After his stay in Rome and his travels between Europe and the United States, he moved to a former convent near Todi. Dorazio provides an interpretation of his art, stating that the abstract painting represents nothing but itself, as it is made up of elements of vision: color, space, matter, dimensions, and movement, which combine to convey sensations and emotions. Art is synthesized in the representation of the unreal, which, however, is capable of evoking emotions and conveying true sensations.

Piero Dorazio's artistic production spans approximately sixty years, and the main outcome of his research is embodied in a long series of abstract works. Starting in the 1960s, his works reveal a mixture of primary colors used in an almost divisionist manner. The so-called “grids,” as defined by critics, construct a structure that creates a sensation of space. Dorazio increasingly investigated the texture of the reticoli and created actual enlargements that featured overlapping oblique, horizontal, and vertical lines. His constructions suggest a sense of movement and light. Over the years, the artist's painting becomes increasingly rhythmic, full of contrasts and points of light and shadow, with patches of color traced in order, intuitively and dynamically. The close study of the structure of composition is a constant theme throughout the painter's late work, which includes Composizione verde (Green Composition) and Ovale blu (Blue Oval). Until the 2000s, the theme of ‘grids’ was analyzed in many works that made him one of the most important abstract artists on the Italian and international scene. After achieving a prominent position in the abstract art scene, the artist passed away in Perugia in 2005. His works are exhibited in museums around the world.