Piero Dorazio biography

Piero Dorazio was an Italian painter among the main exponents of Italian Abstractism. He was born in Rome in 1927. After finishing high school, he enrolled in the Faculty of Architecture.
From 1945 he participated in the activities of the group Social Art and together with his friends Lucio Manisco, Mino Guerrini and Achille Perilli frequents the studio of Renato Guttuso, although he soon distances himself from socialist realism and adheres to abstractionism.
In 1947, Piero Dorazio is among the signatories of the manifesto Gruppo Forma 1, together 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 resided for a year.
In 1950, together with Perilli and Guerrini, Piero Dorazio opened the bookshop-gallery L'Age d'Or, which in 1951 merged with the Origine group of Mario Ballocco, Alberto Burri, Giuseppe Capogrossi, Ettore Colla, giving life to the Fondazione Origine, within which Colla and Dorazio publish the magazine Arti Visive.
In 1953, together with his wife Virginia Dortch, he settled in New York where he held his first solo exhibitions in the Wittenborn One-Wall Gallery and in 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 the painters Willem de Kooning, Mark Rothko, Jackson Pollock, Barnett Newman, Robert Motherwell and the art critic art Clement Greenberg.
Back in Italy, Piero Dorazio continued an intense exhibition activity in various Italian galleries and made numerous trips to many European cities.
In 1959 he participated in Documenta 2 in Kassel. In 1960, he founded the fine arts department at the School of Fine Arts at the Pennsylvania University in Philadelphia where he held the position of both director and professor for one semester a year until 1967.
Piero Dorazio exhibited in three editions of the Venice Biennale in 1960, where, invited by Lionello Venturi, a personal room was dedicated to him, in 1966 and 1988.
In 1961 Berlin, participates in the activities of the Gruppo Zero together with Heinz Mach, Otto Pine and Gunter Uecher.
In 1963 he takes part in the collective exhibition Contemporary Italian Paintings, set up in some Australian cities. In 1963-64 he exhibited at the exhibition Peintures italiennes d'aujourd'hui , organized in the Middle East and North Africa. In 1965 he participated in the exhibition The responsive eye at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.
In 1971, Piero Dorazio moved permanently to Todi where he purchased an ancient Camaldolese hermitage and here he continued to work until 2005, the year of his death.