Piero Dorazio. La formazione artistica

This volume is a complete monograph on Piero Dorazio's career, one of the most important of the European artists who turned their attention to the traditions and languages of abstraction; choosing to abandon, from the fifties onward, any autonomous articulation of sign and endowing colour with an authentically structural function constituted by space and depth.
The monograph analyses Piero Dorazio's heritage, tradition and impulse towards transformation, his Roman period 1948-1953, his first stay in New York (1953-54), the awareness of his own cultural vision between 1954 and 1959, and the meaning of line, colour and light in his works.
An analysis of chosen works follows alongside a bibliography and appendix.
Born in Rome in 1927, Piero Dorazio completed his classical studies and attended the faculties of architecture in both Rome and Paris. His first expositions were given in the forties, here he produced canvasses that recalled futurism, a movement that captured his interest especially for the concept of force-line. In 1947, at Gattuso's studio together with Perilli with whom he was in close contact, he met Accardi, Attardi, Consagra, Guerrini, Sanfilippo and Turcato and with this group of artists he formed "Forma 1", against the political limits of Socialist realism, in defence of abstract art and for the rebirth of Italian art. In the opening years of the fifties Dorazio began to divide his geometric surfaces into ordered yet disturbing texture of space-light-colour until he reached, at the end of the decade, colour as the central element in his research into space. He settled permanently in America where he taught for ten years, in the Fine Arts Department of Pennsylvania University in Philadelphia, until 1970. In 1974 he moved to Todi, after having travelled almost the entire world. He has exhibited in Osaka, Bologna, Milan, Paris, Bergamo, Frankfurt and Genoa. He has taken part in the Venice Biennials of 1952, 1960, 1966, and 1988 and at the Rome Quadrennial in 1948. He lives and works in Todi (Perugia).