Piero Dorazio (Italian, 1927 – 2005)
Gonage
12 x 9 1/2 inches
Gouache on paper
Signed lower right
The work is affixed to a 19 x 15 inch board which
includes the artist’s signature and date, 1949

Provenance follows this piece as a gift in 1950 to the artist-colleague Luigi Lucioni, who then gifted it in 1955 to his friend, the uncle of the current owner who has owned the work since 1988.

BIO:
Born in Italy, Piero Dorazio studied architecture in Rome. At the same time his first abstract works were executed. In 1947 he received a scholarship from the Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Beaux Arts in Paris, where he contacted Modern artists, who lived in Paris. He founded the galleries “Age d’Or” in Florence and Rome to represent avant-garde arts in Italy.

During a one year stay in the USA he got acquainted with leading artists of Abstract Expressionism such as Marc Rothko, Robert Motherwell and Barnett Newman. At that time he also intensively studied Wassily Kandinsky’s essays, whose theory of the immaterial aspects in painting influenced him strongly.

In 1959 Piero Dorazio participated in the “Documenta II” in Kassel. Afterwards he accepted a teaching position at the University of Pennsylvania, where Piero Dorazio founded the Institute of Contemporary Art in 1963 and was appointed professor in 1968.

In the 1960’s the first compositions of ink ribbons were executed in his studio in New York, which dominated his work henceforth. After his return to Italy Dorazio moved to the former romanic cloister of Todi in Umbria. Piero Dorazio was regarded up to great age as one of the leading Italian artists of concrete colour painting.

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