Piero Dosi, Un cuore a buon prezzo, 1998, Oil on Canvas

Piero Dosi trained at the Liceo Artistico in Ravenna, where the teachers were mostly students of Luigi Varoli, and attended other schools of engraving and design between Florence and Milan. Toward the end of the 1960s he began his career as a figurative but anti-realistic painter who, over time, found a favorite theme in self-portraits. In the 1970s and 1980s, a hyperrealist approach to figuration prevails in him, but the almost photographic renderings of the subjects (portraits and self-portraits) are soiled by apparent tears, writing, overlays that mimic the collage technique, and details reminiscent of Francis Bacon's bodily deformations. He then firmed up a relationship with nature and found unprecedented vitalistic accents in an original and anti-graceful mix of futurism, fauvism and pointillism: aspects that would return to his work after a parenthesis (1990s) that was almost abstract, informal and, at times, even decorative.