Exhibition “SPACES OF LIGHT. Piero Dorazio and the International ZERO Movement”

Cortesi Gallery Milano is pleased to present an exhibition and a book devoted to the relations between Piero Dorazio (1927, Rome – 2005, Perugia), a master of Post-War Italian abstract art, and the international ZERO movement. The exhibition, curated by Francesca Pola and organized in collaboration with the Piero Dorazio Archives, draws a comparison between Dorazio’s work and a network of European artists who in the late 1950s - between Germany, Italy, Holland, Belgium, and France –sought to overcome the gestural and subjective identity of Art Informel in favor of a more objective and direct relationship between art and the world - by creating monochrome surfaces, weaves, and grids, as well as objects modulating, reflecting, or projecting light.

From his début as a painter in the 1940s, when he was still an architecture student, Dorazio established himself as a pioneer of Post-War abstractionism. He developed a visual language centered on a redefinition of the technique of painting by assigning a new meaning to light, color and structure. By the mid-1950s, he had already forged close ties with the German art scene and with the founders of ZERO, Heinz Mack and Otto Piene, as well as with Günther Uecker.

The year 2021 marks the 60th anniversary of some salient and crucial moments in these relations: Piero Dorazio’s major solo exhibition at the Kunstverein für die Rheinlande und Westfalen in Düsseldorf in October and November 1961, which was attended by ZERO artists; the publication and presentation of the third, last, and most significant issue of the journal ZERO, featuring contributions by over thirty international artists (including Dorazio himself), in July 1961; and the first exhibition from the “Nove Tendencije” series, inaugurated at the Galerija Suvremene Umjetnosti in Zagreb in August 1961, and inspired by Dorazio’s personal room at the Venice Biennale the previous year. Dorazio also participated in key exhibitions of the movement, including “NUL” at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam.

It was Dorazio who introduced ZERO to the United States, inviting Otto Piene to serve as a visiting professor at the University of Pennsylvania, where, in 1964, Piene organized the first ZERO exhibition in America. The following year, Dorazio took part, alongside artists such as Mack, Uecker, Castellani and Morellet, in “The Responsive Eye” at The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York, an exhibition devoted to visual perception.

The works on display—including rare pieces from the 1950s and 1960s, such as Reading the Green (1959), from the Sammlung Domnick—attest to the breadth of this relationship. The exhibition is accompanied by a bilingual book edited by Francesca Pola and published by Skira, which brings together, for the first time, letters, photographs and documents from the Dorazio Archive, confirming the artist’s role as a source of inspiration for an entire generation of European artists.

More information

Catalogue