Piero Dorazio was born on June 29, 1927 in Rome, Italy, into a cultured, liberal family originally from the mountainous Abruzzo region. His grandfather was a wine-maker, his father a civil servant, while his mother pursued her interests in history and art, despite raising six children, of whom Piero and his twin sister Paula were the youngest.
Dorazio attended the Julius Caesar Lyceum in Rome. After the war, he began to study architecture at the University of Rome.
In defiance of his friend Guttuso, Dorazio co-founded the group Forma in 1947, dedicating himself to abstraction in uncompromising terms. In 1950 Piero helped organize the cooperative gallery of the Age d’Or group in Rome and Florence and in 1952 promoted the international foundation Origine in Rome, which published the periodical Arti Visive.
In 1953 he traveled to the United States, where he met Motherwell, Rothko, Kiesler, Kline and Clement Greenberg, and gave his first one-man exhibitions at the Wittenborn One-Wall Gallery and the Rose Fried Gallery in New York. After returning to Rome in 1954, Dorazio periodically visited Paris, London and Berlin, where he became a friend of Will Grohmann and the dealer Rudolf Springer. His book "La fantasia dell’arte nella vita moderna" appeared in 1955. He traveled to Switzerland, Spain and Antibes in 1957, the year of his first one-man show in Rome, at the Galleria La Tartaruga. From 1960 to 1969 he taught at the Graduate School of Fine Arts at the University of Pennsylvania. Since then Dorazio held many academic positions in the United States. He visited Greece, Africa and the Middle East in 1970 and in 1974 settled in Todi, Italy.
Among the several exhibitions of his work organized in Italy and in foreign countries are those at the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris in 1979, at the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, in 1979, and at the Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea in Rome in 1983. He participated at the major international shows, such as the Venice Biennale, where he exhibited in 1960, 1966 and 1988. During the following years he had private and public commissions such the creation of mosaics in the subway stations of Rome. The artist died in Todi in May 2005.
Sistina I
Untitled V
Irish
Kókkora
Myrina
Apex
In Croce III
Untitled
Untitled
Rosso Perugino
Untitled
Composite
Momento continou
Untitled
Sospensioni Colorate
Paplito della Luce
No – Stop
Cercles du Matin
Munich Olympic Games Poster
Wait - Untitled XIX
Untitled
Cercles de Nuit
Aurora
Wig-Wam
Very Sharp
Dorazio created monochromatic, pictorial paintings whose surface consisted of woven strands of color and were likened to “a visible net.” As Dorazio’s work progressed, he continued his linear, crisscrossed paintings using designs that varied in density and complexity but were consistently concerned with luminosity.
Quotations: "For me, colour is an instrument, not a means of expression."
Piero was described as an "outspoken, independent character" who was the "opposite of politically correct."
Dorazio was married twice. He had two daughters, Angela and Allegra, who live in Rome and London, and a son, Justin, in New York.
