Piero Dorazio biography

Piero Dorazio was an Italian painter among the main exponents of Italian Abstract Art. He was born in Rome in 1927. After finishing Classical High School, he enrolled in the Faculty of Architecture.
Since 1945 he participated in the activities of the Arte Sociale group and together with friends Lucio Manisco, Mino Guerrini and Achille Perilli frequented the studio of Renato Guttuso, although he soon distanced himself from socialist realism and adhered to abstractionism.
In 1947, Piero Dorazio was among the signatories of the manifesto of the Forma 1 Group, 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 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 Origine Foundation, 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 the art critic 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 both the position of 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, he was given a personal room, in 1966 and in 1988.
In 1961 in Berlin, he participated 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 Peintures italiennes d'aujourd'hui exhibition, organized in the Middle East and North Africa. In 1965 he took part in the The responsive eye exhibition 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.