Dear Friends,

Seventeen years ago today, I lost my treasured friend Piero Dorazio (1927–2005). In celebration of this consummate artist, I’m pleased to present a sampling of his paintings, works on paper, prints, and sculpture in a new viewing room, Piero Dorazio (1927–2005): Selected Works.

A central figure in the avant-garde, Dorazio became an artist of world significance during the 1950s and 1960s. Committing himself to the primacy of color in painting, he embarked on a long series of works based on a subtle mesh of linear hues, woven and crosshatched into a dense, surface-bound pictorial unity. He painted with an acute awareness of the specificity of his medium and of the art historical precedents that impelled the nature of his abstractions. That knowledge is manifest on the surface of his canvases, as brilliantly evident in his frenzied, luminous, but impeccably ordered compositions. In his own theorization on abstraction he attributed the structure of his work to instinct, likening it to an entity as elusive as “the unexplored world of the modern soul.” This was not the language of cheap sentimentality. Dorazio’s formalist approach to finding compositional structure was one of painstaking rigor.

During the 1960s and 1970s, Dorazio extended the range of his art by entering a new dialectic between the formal rigor of New York abstraction and his own synthesis of influences drawn from the full scope of European and American modern art movements. Toward the end of the 1970s, he created increasingly polyphonic, interlocked cross harmonies of color. He also turned outward to nature (especially in his drawings and watercolors), to the Mediterranean itself and to its intense, clarifying light.

As the art critic Dore Ashton wrote in 2004:

Light verily exists in Dorazio,
and will become
a kind of reality in painting
thanks to Dorazio,
a concentration and fixation on
a point of light
re-emerging from abyss,
repeated to infinity.

For me, Dorazio’s work continues to represent the supreme achievement of what modern abstract painting can be. He achieved exactly what he intended, placing us squarely in the presence of true art.

VISIT OUR VIEWING ROOM

Click here to View the More Information About Moeller Fine Art - Piero Dorazio 1927–2005 : Selected Works