Piero Dorazio (1927-2005)
Artist's Resale Right ("Droit de Suite"). Artist's… Read more
Piero Dorazio (1927-2005)

Georgia quale

Details
Piero Dorazio (1927-2005)
Georgia quale
signed and dated ‘DORAZIO 57’ (lower right)
oil on canvas
63 x 37 3/8in. (160 x 95cm.)
Painted in 1957
Provenance
Private Collection, Italy (acquired directly from the artist circa 1960).
Anon. sale, Christie's Milan, 2 April 2014, lot 14.
Acquired at the above sale by the present owner.
Literature
M. Volpi Orlandini, Dorazio, Venice 1977, no. 247 (illustrated, unpaged).
Exhibited
Rome, Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna, Pittura Italiana Contemporanea, 1958; this exhibition later travelled to Tunisi, Municipal Casino; and to Copenhagen, Charlotteborg Palace, no. 65 (illustrated with wrong orientation, unpaged).
Special notice
Artist's Resale Right ("Droit de Suite"). Artist's Resale Right Regulations 2006 apply to this lot, the buyer agrees to pay us an amount equal to the resale royalty provided for in those Regulations, and we undertake to the buyer to pay such amount to the artist's collection agent.
Further details
This work is registered in the Archivio Piero Dorazio, Milan, as per photocertificate dated 3 July 2018.

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Mariolina Bassetti
Mariolina Bassetti

Lot Essay

Celebrating the rich expressive possibilities of the artistic gesture,
Georgia quale emerged during a period of intense experimentation in
Piero Dorazio’s oeuvre, as he began to shift towards a more geometric
sense of formalism in his painting. Moving away from the explosive,
brightly coloured patterns and experimental three-dimensional works
which had previously occupied his art, the series of transitional
paintings which emerged in 1957 contained a new sense of structure
and form in their composition, as line and gesture became a central
focus in his creative practice. While these lyrical, painterly works
still focused on the material qualities of paint, the flowing, dynamic
brushwork now frequently coalesced into a loose, grid-like pattern,
each stroke of pigment containing a distinct sense of linearity as they
criss-cross the canvas. Building the composition through dense layers
of pigment, Dorazio generates a new sensation of depth and movement
in these works, drawing the eye into the very centre of the painting.

For Dorazio, the 1950s were an important period of exploration and
travel, during which he was exposed to the ideas of a number of
important thinkers, writers, and artists across the globe. After highly
productive trips to both Paris and Prague, he visited America for
the first time in 1953, accepting an invitation to attend a seminar
at Harvard. This trip would prove revelatory to his artistic practice,
bringing him into contact with many of the leading figures of the
Abstract Expressionist movement, including Willem de Kooning, Franz
Kline, Jackson Pollock, Robert Rauschenberg and Helen Frankenthaler.
Drawn to the vibrant artistic community that centred around New
York, Dorazio remained in the United States for several months, only
returning to Rome in the summer of 1954. These experiences played
a key role in helping him perfect his own form of abstraction, opening
his art to the rich potential of the expressive painterly gesture. Indeed,
with its visceral handling of paint and decentralised composition
Georgia quale contains echoes of the paintings of de Kooning and
Pollock, while simultaneously hinting at the new direction in which
Dorazio’s art would travel over the following decade.

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