PIERO DORAZIO - Biography
Italian painter, born in Rome in 1927. Died in May 2005. Piero Dorazio began his life as a student with architecture, but quickly turned to art and painting in particular. At the age of twenty he participates in the drafting of the "Form I" manifesto, a manifesto that will guide the whole of his future work.
In 1950, he founded the library-gallery "L'age d'Or" ("The Golden Age") with M. Guerilli and A. Perilli, a cooperative of artists in favor of the dissemination of art and artistic printing . In 1952 and 53, he collaborated with the magazine "Visual Arts" and published, almost two years later, "The fantasy of art in modern life".
After a long series of training trips (Prague, Paris, United States in 1960) he will become professor of art at the University of Pennsylvania (Philadelphia). In France he met Braque, Arp, Léger, Magnelli, Le Corbusier, all artists he greatly appreciated. In the United States, Dorazio befriends Hans Richter and Robert Motherwell.
Piero Dorazio specializes in Italian art in rebirth, but at the same time carries on his work as a painter, art critic, lecturer and organizer of exhibitions. Since 1984, he collaborates for the "Corriere della Sera", becoming the accredited art critic of the newspaper. He begins his career as a painter with figurative works, but these will later take on a cubist and then futurist spirit, characterized by vivid and contrasting tones. Linear sculpture appears in 1947. Dorazio will experience a constructivist period (1955), then informal. The "gesture" is of capital importance for Dorazio; his "lattices" of overlapping lines and colors, which know how to create a skilful optical melange of tones, are the expression of his gestures.
