Piero Dorazio was born Piero D’Orazio on June 29, 1927, in Rome, where he undertook formal studies in architecture at the University of Rome from 1945 to 1951. Around the same time, he joined the Arte Sociale group, which published a single issue of Ariele and La Fabbrica. In 1947 he co-founded the group Forma 1, which produced a Manifesto del Formalismo-Forma 1. Also in 1947, Dorazio was awarded a scholarship to the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris, where he studied for a year and met Severini, Braque, Vantongerloo, Pevsner, Arp, Sonia Delaunay, Le Corbusier and other prominent artists. In 1950 he helped organise 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.
Read MoreIn 1953 Dorazio travelled to the United States, where he met Motherwell, Rothko, Kiesler, Kline and Clement Greenberg. He presented his first solo 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 was published in 1955. Dorazio travelled to Switzerland, Spain and Antibes in 1957, the year of his first solo 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. After this period, 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 organised in Italy and in other countries, are those at the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris (1979), at the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo (1979) and at the Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea in Rome (1983). Dorazio participated at 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.
Text courtesy Mazzoleni.
