Rome, 1927 – Perugia, 2005

Piero Dorazio was born in Rome on 29 June 1927. From 1945 to 1951 he attended the Faculty of Architecture at the University of Rome and in the same period joined the Arte Sociale group and collaborated in the first Forma 1 exhibitions.

In 1947 he won a scholarship to the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris, where he resided for a year and met Severini, Braque, Arp, Le Corbousier and other important artists of the Parisian scene. In 1950 he opened the bookshop gallery L’Age d’or with Perilli and Guerrini, which merged in 1951 with the Origine Group to form the Origine Foundation.

In the 1950s he produced monochrome works with lines and dots in relief, which can be compared to informal painting. In 1953, he travelled to the United States, where he met Motherwell, Rothko, Kiesler, Kline and Clement Greenberg and had his first solo exhibitions at the Wittenborn One-Wall Gallery and the Rose Fried Gallery in New York. He also met Hans Richter, a lifelong friendship, whose work would greatly influence his style. He returned to Rome in 1954. He then travelled periodically to Paris, London and Berlin, where he became friends with Will Grohmann and the dealer Rudolf Springer.

In 1957 he travelled to Switzerland, Spain and the Côte d’Azur, and in the same year he had his first solo exhibition in Rome at Galleria La Tartaruga. The first overlapping colour grids date back to 1958, which later became pure pigments distributed on the canvas in large parallel, crossed or overlapping bands.
In the 1960s he taught at the Graduate School of Fine Arts at the University of Pennsylvania; since then he has held various academic positions in the United States. In 1970 he travelled to Greece, Africa and the Middle East; in 1974 he returned to Italy and settled in Todi.

Numerous anthological exhibitions were organised in Italy and abroad, including in 1979 at the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, at the Albright-Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo in the same year and at the Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea in Rome in 1983. Dorazio’s presence in important international exhibitions is constant, such as the Venice Biennale where the artist exhibited in 1960, 1966 and 1988.