„ALONG THESE LINES“
PIERO DORATIO – MASTER OF LUMINOUS TEXTURES
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„Along these Lines“ is a tribute to one of Italy’s greatest painters of the 20th century and a prominent figure in the evolvement of abstraction: Piero Doratio.
Steeped in the culture of the School of Paris and influenced by major artists of the New York School such as Willem de Kooning, Franz Kline and Barbett Newman with whom he became friends during his stay in New York in 1953-54, Piero Dorazio introduced large formats and experimented with all the chromatic potential of oil painting.
He was a painter but also an art critic, lecturer, curator, and professor. Furthermore he was also one of the greatest Italian intellectuals of the second half of the 20th century. Piero Doratio is an essential artist going against the tide of the avant-garde of his time, who questions the place of painting and the evolution of abstraction.
Born in Rome in 1927, after brief studies in architecture, he quickly turned to the visual arts, particularly painting. Leaving figuration behind at the age of 20, he co-authored the Forma I manifesto in 1947 with Pietro Conagra, Achille Perelli, Carla Accardi and Giulio Turcato.
Strongly inspired by Futurism and expressing leftist political views, the manifesto contrasted with the ideals of Socialist Realism, as illustrated by Renato Guttuso. It marked Dorazio’s full embrace of abstract art, and served as a guideline for the rest of his career.
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In the 1950s, Dorazio began collaborating with several art journals, and writing as an art critic. He published The Fantasy of Art in Modern Life (1955), and worked as a lecturer and exhibition manager, until becoming the official critic for the Corriere della Sera newspaper in 1984.
Dorazio’s highly experimental approach to art took him from Cubism to Futurism, always with bright, contrasting colours. In 1951, Dorazio discovered the work of Giacomo Balla and helped resurrect the artist’s reputation by bringing his work to New York. Inspired by Balla’s work on Divisionism earlier in the century, Dorazio began creating meshes, overlapping chromatic structures reinventing both space and surface.
In 1960, Dorazio had a room dedicated to his work at the Venice Biennale and embarked on a series of formative journeys to France, where he met Braque, Arp, Léger and Le Corbusier, and to the United States, where he started frequenting the studios of major artists from the New York School, such as Hans Richter, Robert Motherwell, Willem De Kooning and
Jackson Pollock.
His paintings were again exhibited at the Venice Biennale in 1966. Today, many are housed in the collections of major European museums in Italy, France, Switzerland, England and the USA.
Piero Dorazio is a painter of colour and light, whose movement he was also attempting to convey. He resorted to uniform repetitions of coloured grids placed and overlaid at regular intervals.
The structure of the work is created through this colourful web, more or less thin, broad or tight. Abstract and international, Piero Dorazio was quickly recognized by the art world, not only in his own country but also throughout Europe and even in the United States where he lived and took an active part in the New York artistic scene.
Artworks of this exhibition as well as other artworks presented on this website can be purchased online at COAX Contemporary Art Exchange.
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„Along these Lines“
Piero Doratio – Master of Luminous Textures
20 February 2022 – 20 May 2022
N5 Studio
contact@n5studio.de
www.n5studio.de
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