Biography

Piero Dorazio (Rome, 1927 – Perugia, 2005) is one of the most original figures of 20th-century Italian art, and international abstraction.

Largely self-taught, he developed his skills through a combination of art history and architecture studies. In 1947 his career took off: at just twenty years old he founded the Forma 1 group with Accardi, Consagra, Turcato and others, a manifesto of post-war Italian abstract art. The same year, in Paris, he became friends with Matisse, Miró, Braque and Léger.

In the 1950s he travelled to the United States: Harvard, then New York, where he exhibited and got acquainted with the artists of the American avant-garde. In 1960, he became head of the Fine Arts department at the University of Pennsylvania, a position he held for a decade, dividing his time between two continents. These were the years of the Venice Biennale, Documenta in Kassel, and the Prix Kandinsky—an award marked by a memorable gesture: his refusal of the substantial monetary prize as an act of political protest. In the early 1960s he became close to the Zero Group and in 1965 he exhibited at the MoMA in the celebrated exhibition “The Responsive Eye”.

From 1974 onwards, he chose Todi as his permanent retreat and studio, never ceasing to travel and exhibit—in Paris, London, Grenoble, Athens, and Valencia—or to engage with the culture of his time, including through his writings for the Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera. The 1990s brought significant international recognition, such as becoming member of the Akademie der Künste in Berlin and receiving the De Gasperi Prize. Between 1994 and 1996, he created a mosaic for the Colosseo metro station in Rome, bringing art into the daily life of the city where he was born.

He passed away in Perugia in 2005, leaving behind works in the world’s most prestigious museums—including the MoMA, the Tate, the Centre Pompidou, the Peggy Guggenheim Collection, and the GNAMc—testimony to a lifetime dedicated to the exploration of color and light.