Collection: Piero Dorazio

(Rome 1927 - Perugia 2005)

Piero Dorazio was one of the leading figures of European Abstract Art of the late 20th century. His training was early and rooted in the atmosphere of the Roman avant-garde of the Postwar period: at the age of twenty, he participated in the drafting of the manifesto Forma I, a reference point for a generation of artists oriented towards abstraction and distant from both socialist realism and purely informal tendencies.
In 1950, he founded the bookstore-gallery L’Âge d’Or in Rome with Achille Perilli and Mino Guerrini, a cooperative of artists and an international meeting place for the dissemination of art and artistic printing. In the following years, he traveled extensively: Paris, where he met Georges Braque, Fernand Léger, Hans (Jean) Arp, Alberto Magnelli, Le Corbusier; then the United States, where he became friends with Hans Richter and Robert Motherwell and taught at the University of Pennsylvania. His research traversed Constructivism and engaged with the Informal, without ever renouncing a structured vision of pictorial space.
His mature work is immediately recognizable: networks of overlapping lines and colors, constructed with gestural precision, capable of generating optical effects of extraordinary vibration. Color is never decoration, but structure, rhythm, light. From 1984, he collaborated with Corriere della Sera as an art critic, bringing the same analytical clarity that characterized his work as a painter into the Italian cultural debate.
His original screen prints and lithographs consistently explore the themes of painting: dense chromatic weaves, plays of transparency and overlap in which the graphic sign itself becomes color.