The artistic work of Piero Dorazio,  born in 1927 in Rome, starts directly after the Second World War and is dedicated from the beginning to the phenomena of colour and light. In 1945 he starts his studies in architecture in Rome. From 1947 to 1948 he stays in Paris enabled by a Scholarship for the École nationale supérieure des Beaux-Arts. In 1950 he returns to Italy and founds the gallery forum Age d'Or in Rome und Florence. From 1953 to 1954  he spends a year abroad in the USA meeting with  f.e. Marc Rothko, Robert Motherwell und Barnett Newman. In 1961  he is granted with the Prix Kandinsky. In 1960 he starts teaching at the Pennysylvania University School of Design and becomes Professor in 1968. During the 60's the first  works with colour bands arise. In 1970 he returns to Italy. In 1973 the first "Grey Changing" arises. In 1974 he settles down in an old abandoned cloister in Todi Umbria, Italy.  In 1997 he is awarded with the Michelangelo-Price from the Accademia dei Virtuosi del Panthenon. With the use of geometry as an artistic medium, he captures the factors light and colour and brings them to the canvas. In his delicately structured and atmospheric, grid-like painting, which is strongly affected by his architectural studies, light itself is a consistently central theme. Moreover, colour manifests itself as a luminous configuration of variation through abstract sequences of patterns and fields. In this context, the term ‘abstract’ applies only in the sense that the paintings are not figurative. Still today, Dorazio is deemed one of the most important Italian artists of the second half of the 20th century and is viewed as a pioneer of Abstraction in Italy. In 2005 he dies in Perugia, Umbria.