(Rome, 29 June 1927 – Perugia, 17 May 2005) was an Italian painter, who with his paintings contributed since 1945 to the affirmation of abstractionism in Italy. After attending classical studies in Rome, he studied architecture for four years. In 1947 he was among the signatories of the Gruppo Forma 1 manifesto, together with Ugo Attardi, Pietro Consagra, Mino Guerrini, Achille Perilli, Antonio Sanfilippo, Giulio Turcato and Carla Accardi. In the same year, he won a scholarship from the École nationale supérieure des beaux-arts in Paris, where he resided for a year. With Perilli and Guerrini in 1950, he opened the bookshop gallery “L’Age d’Or” in Rome, which in 1951 merged with the “Origine” group of Mario Ballocco, Alberto Burri, Giuseppe Capogrossi, Ettore Colla, giving life to “Fondazione Origine”, within which Colla and Dorazio publish the magazine “Arti Visive”. During his stay in the United States, he came into contact with 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 this period, Dorazio also concentrated on the study of the writings of Vasilij Vasilyevich Kandinsky, whose theory on the immaterial aspects of painting would influence him considerably. He later returned to Italy where he continued an intense and constant exhibition activity with personal works in various cities such as Milan, Venice and Rome. He periodically makes artistic stays in many European cities including Paris, London, Prague, Düsseldorf and Berlin which will contribute to spreading his popularity and fame even far from Italy.

In 1960, he founded the fine arts department at the School of Fine Arts at Pennsylvania University in Philadelphia, which in the sixties had been recognized as the best art and architecture school in the United States of America and of which he would hold the position of director. In 1961 he participated in the Gruppo Zero activity in Berlin together with Heinz Mach, Otto Pine and Gunter Uecher, while in Paris he received the Kandinsky Prize and the first prize of the Biennale des Jeunes while one of his solo shows was set up in the spaces of the Kunstverein in Düsseldorf. During the period 1963-1965, Dorazio exhibited some of his works in various exhibitions such as the Contemporary Italian Paintings in Australia, the Peintures Italiennes d’aujourd’hui, organized in the Middle East and North Africa and The Responsive Eye at the Museum of Modern Art from New York. In 1966, after his second participation in the Venice Biennale, he exhibited at the Galerie Im Erker in San Gallo, where he established an artistic partnership with Giuseppe Ungaretti: for the occasion, Ungaretti wrote an essay on his painting for the presentation of the catalogue while in 1967 it was Dorazio to create a series of graphics to accompany Ungaretti’s collection of poems entitled “La luce”. In 1970 he definitively interrupted his teaching activity to dedicate himself exclusively to painting. After having had his studio in Rome, Paris, New York, Philadelphia, and Berlin, in 1974 he moved permanently to Todi, where he purchased an ancient Camaldolese hermitage and continued to create here until 2005, the year of his death. In 1984 he married Giuliana Soprani. In 1989 he collaborated on the Fiumara d’arte project of Tusa, a large open-air museum park of contemporary art designed by Antonio Presti, with the colourful ceramic decoration of the Carabinieri barracks of Castel di Lucio created in collaboration with Graziano Marini. His works are typically consistent with the abstract style, very rich in bright colours, which highlight bands and crossed grids. His style is very close to the movement defined by Clement Greenberg as “Post-painterly abstraction”.