Piero Dorazio

Jun 29, 1927 - May 17, 2005

Since 1945 Dorazio studied architecture in Rome. At the same time first abstract works were executed. In 1947 he received a scholarship from the Ecole nationale supérieure des Beaux Arts in Paris, where he contacted Modern artists, who lived in Paris and began associating and exhibiting with other young and progressive artists, including those in Forma 1, the first group of Italian abstract artists. Mr. Dorazio started exploring abstraction in the late 1940's and in the late 1950's began to create all-over meshes of colored lines producing expansive paintings that asserted vivid color and simplified, often geometrically ordered design, he would continue to work with the tension between lyrical sensuality and formalist rigor. During a one year stay in the USA he got acquainted with leading characters of Abstract Expressionism. In 1959 he participated in the documenta II in Kassel. Afterwards he accepted a teaching position at the University of Pennsylvania, where he founded the Institute of Contemporary Art in 1963 and was appointed professor in 1968. In the 1960's the first compositions of ink ribbons were executed in his studio in New York, which dominated his work henceforth. After his return to Italy Dorazio moved to the former romanic cloister of Todi in Umbria. Dorazio was regarded up to great age as one of the leading Italian artists of concrete colour painting. Piero Dorazio died at the age of 77 in Perugia on 17 May 2005.