Piero Dorazio (Rome 1927 - Todi 2005)

Piero Dorazio was born in Rome in 1927. From a very early age he devoted himself to painting, so that the heated debate of the immediate post-war era, between socially engaged art and formalism, already saw him consciously, combatively committed to art that was independent of all political conditioning. With these intentions he soon outgrew the Arte Sociale group, of which he had been a member, and of the reviews Ariele and La Fabbrica, and instead, with other young colleagues, founded the review Forma, publishing a manifesto issue - the first Italian document that moved decisively towards abstract art (March-April 1947). From then on he joined or edited a whole series of movements and associations or reviews, notably the Art Club, the Age d’Or, Spazio, and Arti Visive.
From that time onwards, working tirelessly in Italy, France, Germany, and soon the United States (where for the first time he had an extended stay in 1953 and 1954), Dorazio, often accompanied in these years by Achille Perilli and Mino Guerrini, proposed with consequential and cutting polemical rigour, and through his countless acquaintances and friendships among avant-garde artists and intellectuals in Europe and America, his own vision of painting that seeks an abstraction far from the gestural art and the materiality that characterise the whole international Informalist scene; a kind of painting which looked to the Italian masters of divisionism (Previati, Boccioni and Balla), and the example of a few great masters of the first historical avant-gardes, such as Kandinsky and Matisse. A form of art based on light and its interaction with colour. From the Venice Biennale to the Documenta in Kassel, Dorazio exhibited on a number of occasions in the most prestigious international collective exhibitions, and held one-man shows in equally important private venues throughout the world.
In 2005, he died in Todi where he had been living for many years.