ALBERTO BURRI
Alberto Burri was born in 1915 in Città di Castello. After earning a degree in medicine, he served as a medical officer during World War II. In 1944, he was captured in North Africa along with his unit and imprisoned in Hereford, Texas. It was there that he began painting, using the burlap sacks available to him. After his release in 1946, he moved to Rome, and the following year, he held his first solo exhibition at Galleria La Margherita. Like many Italian artists of his generation, Burri rejected the politicized realism that was widespread in the late 1940s, turning instead toward abstraction and becoming a key figure in Informal Art. Between 1949 and 1950, he began experimenting with unconventional materials, creating tactile collages from burlap, tar, and pumice stone. During this period, he developed the Muffe and Gobbi series, the latter featuring shaped canvases that broke away from the traditional two-dimensional surface. His fascination with unconventional materials and the ambiguity of the painted surface led him to join the Gruppo Origine, which exhibited at Galleria dell’Obelisco in Rome in 1951. Burri’s work gained international recognition in 1953 when it was featured in Younger European Painters, a group exhibition at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York. By the mid-1950s, he had begun burning materials in his Combustioni series, using charred wood and burlap, which he exhibited in 1957 at Galleria dell’Obelisco. In 1958, he presented welded iron sheet works at Galleria Blu in Milan and won third prize at the Carnegie International in Pittsburgh. The following year, he received the Premio dell’Ariete in Milan and the UNESCO Prize at the São Paulo Biennial. In 1960, the Venice Biennale dedicated a room to his work, earning him the Critics’ Prize. In the early 1960s, he continued his Combustioni series, expanding his use of fire to plastic materials. His first retrospective in the United States was held in 1963 at the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston, and in 1965, he was awarded the Grand Prize at the São Paulo Biennial. In 1972, the Musée National d’Art Moderne in Paris honored him with a major retrospective. During the 1970s, Burri developed his Cretti series, evocative of sun-scorched earth, playing with the concept of trompe-l'œil. In 1977, a retrospective at the University of California, Los Angeles, was later transferred to the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York. By 1979, he began working with cellotex, an industrial material he would continue to use throughout the 1980s and 1990s. Alberto Burri continued his artistic exploration until his passing in 1995 in Nice.
da BIANCHI E NERI I, 1969
lithography, intaglio
cm 65x45
90 es.
