Piero Dorazio. Forma e colore

Gallerie d’Italia, Milan

Piero Dorazio, a key player on the Italian and international art scene in the late 20th century, is one of the greatest exponents of the abstract and colour exploration as a primary element of composition.

The Intesa Sanpaolo collections include a series of over twenty artworks representing the various stages in his career, now the subject of a new exhibition at the Gallerie d’Italia in Milan: Piero Dorazio. Forma e colore, curated by Francesco Tedeschi in association with the Piero Dorazio Archive.

A constantly evolving artistic vision

The exhibition focuses on key moments from his career, particularly the 1950s and 1960s when his unique talent first emerged.

In the late 1950s Piero Dorazio’s painting conquered the idea of the surface as a constant field, reverberating with the independent force of colour, space and light, as Giuseppe Ungaretti described in 1966:

“In his fabrics, or rather membranes – uniform, almost monochrome, yet woven with different strands of colour, rays of colour – nestled within the honeycombs are hollows imbued with light, armed with stings of light.”

Beyond this season, which culminated in a room of his own at the 1960 Venice Biennale and saw international recognition for his style, Dorazio embarked on a renewal of the form of colour as a material with solutions open to the realms of the imagination; from the mid-1960s onwards his bands of colour expanded to create an infinite source of movement. Pieces like Allaccio A (1966) – from the Fondazione Prada collection – or Endless (1967-1970) reveal a new vision of colour that expands into the atmosphere, reverberating into space or producing new realms of vision; his lively compositions from the late 1960s such as Serpente (1968) and Chocolate Paradise (1970) re-echo the voices of utopian optimism prevalent at the time.

Beginning with one of the works that mark his fluency in the languages of the abstract from the earlier part of the century, Plasticità (1949), and culminating in two pieces from the 1980s that carry forward his dedication to the languages of composition through the colour and internal light of painting, the Piero Dorazio. Forma e colore exhibition underlines the circularity of a language that stands out on the contemporary art scene for its exceptional quality.

 

Date
from 27.09.2019 to 27.10.2019
Past
Opening hours
from 9:30 am to 7:30 pm.
Open until 10:30 pm on Thursdays

Last admission: 1 hour before closing.
Closed on Mondays.
Prices

Combined tickets valid for the exhibitions and permanent collections may be purchased directly from the ticket office:
– full-price: €5.00
– reduced: €3.00
– free entry: every first Sunday of the month

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