Chronology

Piero Dorazio - whose original surname was D’Orazio, a spelling he later altered - was born in Rome on June 29, 1927, alongside his twin sister, Paola. The twins were the youngest of five children born to Sebastiano and Maria Censoni.

He studied at the Liceo Classico Giulio Cesare high school. In 1942–43, through his schoolmate Angiolo Bandinelli, he began attending the studio of his father, the painter Aldo Bandinelli, and painting still lifes and landscapes while studying art history as an autodidact.

Between 1943 and 1944, the artist's family took shelter in Giulianova, Abruzzo, returning to Rome after the city's liberation in June 1944. After the end of World War II, he continued his studies at the Faculty of Architecture, at the University of Rome “La Sapienza,” which he would ultimately abandon.

In 1945—together with Achille Perilli, Mino Guerrini, Lucio Manisco, Carlo Aymonino, Carlo Busiri Vici, Alfio Barbagallo, and Renzo Vespignani—he founded the Gruppo Ariete and later the Gruppo Arte Sociale.

In 1947, with Pietro Consagra, Mino Guerrini, Ugo Attardi, Carla Accardi, Achille Perilli, Antonio Sanfilippo, Giulio Turcato, he founded the Forma 1 group, publishing the collective’s manifesto in the eponymous magazine. That same year he traveled to Paris for the first time where he met, thanks to Gino Severini, many international artists including Georges Braque, Fernand Léger, Hans Arp, and Alberto Magnelli.

In 1948, he exhibited at the Quadriennale of Rome and at the ‘Salon des réalités nouvelles’ in Paris. In Rome, together with Atanasio Soldati and Ettore Sottsass, he organized the exhibition ‘Arte astratta in Italia’.

In 1950, Dorazio, Perilli, and Guerrini opened the “L’Age d’Or,” a library-gallery on Via del Babuino in Rome, specializing in the distribution of avant-garde books and magazines and abstract art exhibitions, which immediately became a point of reference for Roman and international culture.

In 1951, with Ettore Colla and Alberto Burri, he established the Fondazione Origine which he later left in 1954.

In 1953, he was invited to Harvard University to participate in an international seminar on humanism and the arts. He then moved to New York where he befriended several American artists. He presented his first exhibition in New York at George Wittenborn’s One-wall Gallery.

In April 1954, the Rose Fried Gallery held his solo exhibition in New York.

Back in Italy, in 1955 he published La fantasia dell’arte nella vita moderna, which he had worked on for three years. It is a compendium of modern trends in visual arts and was the first book of its kind in Italy. He exhibited at Galleria del Cavallino, Venice.

In 1957, he had his first solo exhibition in Rome at Galleria La Tartaruga.

In 1956 and 1958, he participated in the Venice Biennale. That same year he returned to the United States, to the University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, where he was hired to reorganize and direct the Department of Fine Arts. He would teach here for the next ten years, one semester each year.

In 1959, he exhibited at Documenta 2 in Kassel.

During the 1960s his work was constantly included in major group exhibitions in Italy and internationally. In 1960, he exhibited again at the Venice Biennale, this time with a large solo room.

That same year, he founded the Crack Group with Fabio Mauri, Mimmo Rotella, Giulio Turcato, Pietro Cascella, Achille Perilli, Gastone Novelli, and Gino Marotta and the art critic Cesare Vivaldi.

In 1961, he received the Prix Kandinsky and the Paris Biennale Prize (one million francs which he refused as a sign of protest against French politics in relation to its war in Algeria).

In 1962, he was invited to join the Group Zero, taking part in numerous group exhibitions and publications, and in 1965, his work was included in the exhibition ‘The Responsive Eye’ at MoMA in New York.

In 1966, he held a second solo exhibition at the Venice Biennale and the following year he collaborated with Giuseppe Ungaretti on the book La Luce (a collection of 20 poems with 14 large lithographs) for Im Erker Gallery in St. Gallen, Switzerland.

In 1968, Dorazio moved to Berlin for six months, invited by the German Academy. In Rome and Berlin, he actively joined the uprising of the student movement.

In 1969, he moved to the countryside near Rome and devoted most of his time to painting.

In 1976 Dorazio joined the Radical Party, for which he ran in the 1979 political elections, but was not elected.

In 1977, the publisher Alfieri issued a monograph with a contribution to his catalog raisonné, and in 1979, his first retrospective took place in France at the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris. The exhibition then travelled to Albright-Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo and at numerous other museums in the United States.

In the 1980s, he continued to paint tirelessly and fostered friendships with many artists and representatives of Italian and international culture and politics. He participated very actively in the Italian cultural debate in newspapers and magazines, and started to write periodically for the Italian newspaper ‘Corriere della Sera’.

In 1983, he held a retrospective of his work at the Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna in Rome and participated, with a selection of works, in the exhibition ‘Italian Art 1960–1980’ at the Hayward Gallery in London.

In 1986, he received the Accademia di San Luca Prize, awarded to him by the President of the Italian Republic, Francesco Cossiga. That same year, he exhibited in Japan and United States, holding an exhibition of drawings and watercolors at Achim Moeller Fine Art in New York.

In 1988, he presented a solo exhibition at the Venice Biennale dedicated to his friend Giuseppe Ungaretti. Alongside the paintings, the exhibition included the collections of Ungaretti’s poetry ‘Croazia segreta’ and ‘La Luce: Poesie 1914–1971’, illustrated with etchings and lithographs by Dorazio.

During the 1990s his work was featured in major solo exhibitions at the Musée de Grenoble (1990), at the Galleria Civica in Bologna (1991), at the Civic Museum in Athens (1994), and at the PAC in Milan (1988).

In 1990, he received the Alcide de Gasperi Prize for Arts and Sciences and in 1993, he was appointed member of the Akademie der Künste in Berlin. In 1997, he received the Michelangelo Prize from the Accademia dei virtuosi del Pantheon.

Between 1994 and 1996 he supervised the creation of artist mosaics in Rome’s metro stations, executing one for the “Colosseo” station.