Piero Dorazio ^©  

(1927 - 2005)

Title on the reverse

Provenance:
Atelier Dorazio, Todi, No. 2169 (three circular stamps on the reverse with hand-written number);
Galleria Mara Coccia, Rome;
Dorotheum, Vienna, June 1st 2016, Contemporary Art Auction, lot n. 662

Exhibitions:
Piero Dorazio, Galleria Mara Coccia, Rome, May - June 1989

The registration of this artwork in the Dorazio Archive, Milan, is in progress

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Piero Dorazio (Rome, 1927 - Perugia, 2005) was one of the greatest representatives of European abstractionism, an artistic current to which he approached from a young age. The need to remove art from any naturalistic reference and from the social function that until then had characterized it, led to the formation in 1947 of Gruppo Forma 1, which Dorazio directs together with Carla Accardi, Ugo Attardi, Pietro Consagra, Mino Guerrini, Achille Perilli, Antonio Sanfilippo and Giulio Turcato. The members of the group are united by the desire to free art from a psychological or realistic dimension, associating it with the criterion of structure and with a particular attention to the sign and form that become a unique element of expression. These are the key principles that will be the basis of all Dorazian production.

Dorazio finds a key to reading abstract art, affirming that the abstract painting represents nothing but itself, since it consists of elements of vision. Art is summed up in the representation of the unreal, which, however, is able to excite and convey true sensations. Since the 1960s, Dorazio has been closely investigating the plot of the "lattices", creating large canvases that feature oblique, horizontal and vertical overlapping lines.

After touring Europe and the world, in 1973 he bought an old convent in Todi that renovated it to fit home and study. From the Umbrian countryside the artist draws new inspiration, and his painting becomes increasingly rhythmic, full of contrasts and points of light and shadow. And it is to this very fruitful period of his production that the work proposed here belongs: an oil on canvas of 1988 in which full color, space, matter, size and movement contribute to convey emotions, with sign and form that become the only means of expression.

The artist, in an interview with Adachiara Zevi in 1985, stated: "The structure that others call lattice is actually an overlap of parameters. The vertical, the force of gravity; the horizontal, the horizon line and the diagonal, indicative of our course. These are the three directions of our existence".