PIERO DORAZIO

Piero Dorazio (1927 - 2005) was an Italian painter who was pivotal in bringing abstraction to Italy. His oil paintings were often composed of intensely colored bands, which are stretched and intermingled like webs across the surface of the canvas. “The progressive elements in our society have to maintain a revolutionary and avant-garde position,” Dorazio said of creating art. Born on June 29, 1927 in Rome, Italy, he studied painting, drawing and architecture at the University of Rome. In the late 1940s, the artist became active in a variety of artistic and literary circles and went on to become a co-founder of Forma 1, the first group of Italian abstract artists. In 1953, he traveled to New York, where he met the
painters Mark Rothko, Robert Motherwell and Franz Kline. In 1957, Piero Dorazio took a decisive step in his artistic journey, marking a significant transition in his creative exploration. The series to which Senza Titolo belongs, emerged during a pivotal moment when the Roman painter abandoned the explosive gestures and chromatic patterns of his earlier works to embrace an abstraction that prioritized structure and formal order. Moving away from three-dimensional experimentation and chromatic dispersion, Dorazio focused on line, gesture and painterly material, exploring new methods of spatial organization. Today, the artist’s works are held in the collections of the Art Institute of Chicago (USA); The Museum of Modern Art in New York (USA); Tate Gallery, London (UK) and the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C (USA).