Exhibition “Piero Dorazio. Form and Color”

From 27 September to 27 October, the exhibition ‘Piero Dorazio. Form and Color’ will be on display at Gallerie d’Italia – Piazza Scala, Intesa Sanpaolo’s museum venue in Milan, as a tribute to a great master who, from 1945 onwards, contributed to the affirmation of abstraction in Italy.

The exhibition presents a selection of 14 works by Dorazio from the Intesa Sanpaolo collection, complemented by a work from the Fondazione Prada ‘Allaccio A’, painted in 1966, which serves as a point of connection between two periods in Dorazio’s painting of the 1960s.

Curated by Francesco Tedeschi and organized in collaboration with the Piero Dorazio Archive, the exhibition focuses on several pivotal moments in Piero Dorazio’s work during the 1950s and 1960s, when his distinctive position became firmly established.

By the end of the 1950s, his painting had embraced the idea of the surface as a continuous field, within which the autonomous force of color reverberates, becoming both space and form of light, as Giuseppe Ungaretti observed: “In those fabrics of his, or rather membranes, uniform in nature, almost monochrome and yet woven from different threads of color, from rays of color, within the dense honeycombs open the alveoli that hold pupils filled with light, armed with stings of light” (1966).

Beyond this period, which reached its culmination in a solo room at the 1960 Venice Biennale and in the international recognition of his language, Dorazio’s work underwent a renewal of the forms of color as a material capable of generating open-ended solutions within the realm of imagination. From the mid-1960s onwards, his works increasingly expanded bands of color as an infinite source of movement. Works such as Allaccio A (1966) demonstrate a new vision of color expanding into the atmosphere, reverberating outward into space, or producing unprecedented realms of vision. In works from the late 1960s, such as Serpente (1968) and Chocolate Paradise (1970), these constructions echo the voices of the utopian optimism characteristic of the period.

Through one of the paintings that marked his assimilation of the languages of abstraction of the first half of the twentieth century, Plasticità (1949), and two works from the 1980s that continue his commitment to compositional languages articulated through color and the inner light of painting, the sequence presented here seeks to emphasize the circularity of a language whose absolute quality establishes its place within the contemporary landscape.

The themes of the exhibition will be complemented by the international conference ‘Piero Dorazio. Fantasia Colore Progetto’, to be held on 26 and 27 September at the Catholic University of Milan, with the participation of some of the leading scholars of twentieth-century Italian art working at Italian universities. Since Dorazio’s death in 2005, the conference will constitute the first opportunity for an in-depth reconsideration of his figure, his art and the role he played in contemporary culture.

Download the invitation here