In 1968, Piero Dorazio lived and worked in West Berlin on a scholarship from the German Academic Exchange Service. The following year, his works were exhibited at the Haus am Waldsee. At that time, he was 41 years old and internationally renowned as an artist. In the 1950s, he lived in the USA for a while, a time during which he became acquainted with artists of Abstract Expressionism and Marc Rothko's Color Field Painting. From 1959 onwards, he taught at the University of Pennsylvania, among other places. In 1959 and 1964, he participated in the documenta exhibitions in Kassel. Initially, Piero Dorazio had found inspiration in the art of the Italian Futurists. However, he distanced himself from this group due to his fundamentally contrary political views and, after World War II, sought other ways to create a contemporary renewal of art. In his reflections, he critically examined the developments in art history since Impressionism. He found his artistic path in a process of linking primary colors, because “color is a fundamental spatial value and a fundamental value in the language of painting” (Dorazio, in: Exhibition catalog Galerie Im Erker, 1966, n.p.).


Piero Dorazio's stay in Berlin led to “a particularly fruitful creative period” (Thomas Kempas, Peter Nestler, foreword to the exhibition at Haus am Waldsee in 1969). During his six-month scholarship, Piero Dorazio refined his characteristic compositions of overlapping color bands, grids, and beams, creating a series of new painterly variations. These Berlin works mark a phase of intensive formal research in which Dorazio explored the boundaries between color, light, and space and gave his abstract visual language a remarkably fluid, architecturally conceived structure.

The title “Grunewahn” noted on the back of the canvas leaves plenty of room for interpretation. To this day, the year 1968 stands for a time marked by student protests all over Europe and the USA, as well as the crushing of the Prague Spring and the global protests against the Vietnam War. The DAAD scholarship holders lived in walled West Berlin, an ecosystem of a conservative bourgeoisie and a highly active leftist student scene. The introductory text to the exhibition “Piero Dorazio” at Haus am Waldsee in 1969 states: “Most of the visual artists [...] were impressed by the diversity of artistic productivity and the tensions in the social and political fabric of the host city.” It can be said with certainty that this was also true of Piero Dorazio, a very politically minded artist. He lived on Oberhardter Weg in Grunewald. “Grunewahn” can be read as a combination of ‘Grunewald’ and “madness.” Perhaps he expressed the significant discrepancies this divided city endured in 1968 in this painting, colorfully and dynamically. [CH/EH]