PIERO DORAZIO, candlesticks

Piero Dorazio, Rome 1927 – Perugia 2005

Very young, he was influenced by futurists such as Gino Severini, Antonio Corpora, Enrico Prampolini, and Giacomo Balla, attracting him to painting. An aversion to their right-wing views pushed him to align instead with left-leaning artists like Renato Guttuso. Along with Pietro Consagra, Achille Perilli, and Giulio Turcato, he helped formulate a manifesto and establish a group of abstract artists in 1947 called Forma I. Although imbued with socialist leanings, the group did not follow the realist social commentary furthered by Guttuso but proposed to reclaim abstraction from Futurism. In 1947 Dorazio won a prize and a stipend from the French government to study at the École des Beaux-Arts of Paris.
In 1952, he promoted the foundation Origin with Alberto Burri, Ettore Colla and others, and edited the magazine Arti Visive. As a representative of Italy, in 1953 he traveled for the first time to the United States to participate in the International Summer Seminar at Harvard University. That fall, he moved to New York City and stayed through 1954. In October 1953, Dorazio had his first solo exhibition at George Wittenborn’s One-Wall Gallery. During his stay in the United States he met the most important personalities of the time, such as the painters Willem de Kooning, Mark Rothko, Jackson Pollock, Barnett Newman, Robert Motherwell and the art critic Clement Greenberg.
In 1959 he took part in Documenta 2 in Kassel. In 1960, he founded the Department of Fine Arts at the School of Fine Arts at Pennsylvania University in Philadelphia, which in the 1960s was recognized as the best school of art and architecture in the United States of America, and of which he was director and also professor until 1967.
He exhibited in three editions of the Venice Biennale: in 1960, invited by Lionello Venturi, a personal room was dedicated to him; in 1966 and in 1988.
In 1974 he moved permanently near Todi, in Umbria, where he bought an ancient hermitage Camaldolese.
In 1974 he was appointed director of the Atelier School for Modern Ceramics in Todi.
Here in Umbria he continues to work and create until his death, in 2005

2 glazed ceramic candlesticks, white background with colored stripes painted under the enamel
Signed on the bottom with the initials “D Todi”
28,5×11 cm
in perfect condition