Piero Dorazio biography

Piero Dorazio was an Italian painter and one of the main exponents of Italian Abstract art. He was born in Rome in 1927. After finishing high school, he enrolled in the Faculty of Architecture.
Since 1945, he has participated in the activities of the Arte Sociale group and, together with his friends Lucio Manisco, Mino Guerrini, and Achille Perilli, frequented the studio of Renato Guttuso, although he soon distanced himself from socialist realism and embraced abstractionism.
In 1947, Piero Dorazio was among the signatories of the manifesto of the Gruppo Forma 1, along with Ugo Attardi, Pietro Consagra, Mino Guerrini, Achille Perilli, Antonio Sanfilippo, Giulio Turcato, and Carla Accardi. In the same year, he won a scholarship from the École nationale supérieure des beaux-arts in Paris, where he would reside for a year.
In 1950, together with Perilli and Guerrini, Piero Dorazio opened the bookstore-gallery L'Age d'Or on Via del Babuino in Rome, which in 1951 merged with the Origine group of Mario Ballocco, Alberto Burri, Giuseppe Capogrossi, Ettore Colla, giving rise to the Fondazione Origine, within which Colla and Dorazio published the magazine Arti Visive.
In 1953, together with his wife Virginia Dortch, he settled in New York where he held his first solo exhibitions at the Wittenborn One-Wall Gallery and the Rose Fried Gallery. During his stay in the United States, Piero Dorazio came into contact with the most important artists of the time, such as painters Willem de Kooning, Mark Rothko, Jackson Pollock, Barnett Newman, Robert Motherwell and art critic Clement Greenberg.
Back in Italy, Piero Dorazio continues an intense exhibition activity in various Italian galleries and makes numerous trips to many cities in Europe.
In 1959, he participated in Documenta 2 in Kassel. In 1960, he founded the fine arts department at the School of Fine Arts at Pennsylvania University in Philadelphia, where he served as both director and professor for one semester a year until 1967.
Piero Dorazio exhibits in three editions of the Venice Biennale in 1960, where, invited by Lionello Venturi, he is given a personal room, in 1966 and in 1988.
In 1961 in Berlin, he participates in the activities of the Gruppo Zero together with Heinz Mach, Otto Pine, and Gunter Uecher.
In 1963, he participated in the group exhibition Contemporary Italian Paintings, held in several Australian cities. In 1963-64, he exhibited at the show Peintures italiennes d'aujourd'hui, organized in the Middle East and North Africa. In 1965, he took part in the exhibition The responsive eye at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.
In 1971, Piero Dorazio permanently moved to Todi where he purchased an ancient Camaldolese hermitage and continued to work there until 2005, the year of his death.