Alberto Burri
(Città di Castello, 1915 – Nice, 1995)
Alberto Burri was one of the most prominent Italian Abstract painters, traditionally related with Informalism. He held his first solo show in 1947 in Rome at Galleria La Margherita, with a presentation made by Libero De Libero and Leonardo Sinisgalli. The works on display were landscapes and still lifes, sometimes dropped into visions of pure fantasy. The following year, at the same gallery, he exhibited for the first time abstract works dominated by thin and linear graphics. His most famous series, I Sacchi, belong to the first half of the 1950s. On the canvas, uniformly dyed in red or black, he pasted jute bags. These bags always look "poor:" they are worn out and full of ramifications and seams. From 1957 onwards, with the series Le Combustioni, he made a significant turn in his art, introducing fire among his artistic tools. With the flame he burned wood or plastic with which he then created his paintings. In this case the wear that marked the materials no longer belonged to "life," nonetheless, it preserved an energy that had an almost metaphorical primordial value which accelerated the corrosion of the material. In his poetics, therefore, there is always the concept of "consumption" that reaches his greatest cosmic inspiration with the series of Cretti he started in the 1970s. In these works, made with a mixture of kaolin, vinavil, and pigments fixed on cellotex, he reached the maximum grade of purity and expressiveness. In Burri's work, art always intervenes after the art materials have already been used and consumed. They speak to us of a memory, urge us to think about everything that happened in the previous life of those materials before they were definitively fixed in the immobility of the work of art. Burri's poetry has radically called into question the concept of art and its relationship with life: art as a mimetic fiction that imitates life now appears definitively surpassed by an art that illustrates life, bearing the sincerity of life itself.
Among his solo and group exhibitions, we can mention: Burri. Gli artisti e la materia (Scuderie del Quirinale - Rome, 2005); Alberto Burri (Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia - Madrid, 2006); Alberto Burri (Fondazione La Triennale - Milan, 2008); Alberto Burri Graphics Works (Istituto Italiano di Cultura - New York, 2009); Burri e Fontana a Brera (Pinacoteca di Brera - Milan, 2010); Alberto Burri: The Trauma of Painting (Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum - New York, 2015).
