Italian artist Piero Dorazio began exploring abstraction in the late 1940s and in the late 1950s, began his now well-known all-over meshes of brightly colored strips. His expansive paintings asserted radiant color and simple designs, creating pictorial textures that exuded light and color.  

Born in 1927, the artist began painting and drawing as a teenager and after World War II he began exhibiting with other progressive artists, including those in the first group of Italian abstract artists, Forma 1. In addition to his contributions to abstract painting, Dorazio was also involved in organizing exhibitions and writing art criticism. In 1950 he helped found L’Age d’Or, an artist-run gallery, and in 1955 he published the first book on international Modern art to appear in Italy, “La Fantasia Dell-Arte Nella Vita Moderna.” 

In the summer of 1953, Dorazio taught a summer program at Harvard University and befriended American artists such as Willem de Kooning, Franz Kline, Robert Rauchenbuerg, Helen Frankenthaler, and critic Clement Greenberg. From 1961 to 1969 he returned to the United States to teach at the Graduate School of Fine Arts at the University of Pennsylvania, where he helped found the university Institute of Contemporary Art.  

Dorazio has held solo exhibitions at Institut Valencia d’Art Modern in Valencia (retrospective), Achim Moeller Fine Art in New York, Biennale di Venezia (XLIII and XXXIII), Marlborough Gllaery in New York and in London, Musée d’Arte Moderne de la Ville de Paris, and Galleria Cappelletti in Milan. Group exhibitions include the Museum of Modern Art in New York, Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris, Museo d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea in Bolzano, and Albright-Knox Gallery in Buffalo, New York, among many others.