Piero Dorazio
Italian abstraction as woven bands of light, laid down one colour at a time.
Piero Dorazio was born in Rome in 1927, trained as an architect, and in 1947 co-signed the Forma 1 manifesto with Accardi, Consagra and Turcato, arguing for abstraction against the prevailing realism of the Italian left. Time in Paris and then in the United States, where he taught for years at the University of Pennsylvania and knew Newman and Motherwell, shaped the mature work: canvases built from overlapping bands and lattices of transparent colour, laid in strokes that cross and interfere so the surface reads as woven light. He worked in Umbria for the rest of his life and died in 2005.
The 1960s reticoli and the lattice paintings are the strongest part of the market, with the looser, broader-banded works of later decades forming a large and more accessible body. Scale drives value considerably. The paint is thin, applied in transparent layers over a white ground, and any past varnishing or heavy cleaning flattens exactly the effect the picture depends on — condition therefore needs a properly informed eye. Dorazio also produced a substantial output of prints and works on paper, and the Archivio Piero Dorazio handles authentication.
If you own a work by Piero Dorazio
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