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Burri Alberto:
the artist was born in Città di
Castello on March 12th 1915.
Doctor in the war
In 1940 he obtained his medical degree at the Perugia University and
during his military service was an officer in the Medical Corps until
1943, when he was taken prisoner by the British in Tunisia. He started
painting while he was prisoner of war at Hereford, in Texas.
First personal exhibition
After his return to Italy in 1946 he developed his artistic interests,
going to live in Rome with a cousin of his mother, the musician Annibale
Bucchi. His first personal exhibition of expressionist landscapes and
still life was at the La Margherita gallery in 1947. The following year,
after a series of experiments inspired by Joan Mirò and Paul Klee, he
started to create his first abstractions in a cycle of found object
works.
Fascinated by colour
Right from the start Burri was sensitive to the appeal of the physical
properties of both artistic and industrial colours, creating images of
refined elegance using impoverished materials. “Blacks” were obtained by
varying the consistency of the colour, creating shiny and opaque surface
contrasts, random cracking rhythms and texture variations in the
encrusted pigment.
Monochrome
In the “moulds”, the additives in the pigments produced “efflorescence”
of colours similar to a bacterial culture. Burri also introduced the
monochrome concept back in 1951, with the pitch black “tar” series.
Canvasses and traditional frames were used in an anomalous manner to
create three-dimensional “humps” between 1950 and 1952, where Burri
inserted wooden supports to give the work a sculptural effect. At the
same time he terminated a radical re-invention of collage with “sacks”:
rough patched and mended canvasses mounted on the frame, often with
printed captions of where they originally came from.
Details
Although this technique had a precedence in the “Merz paintings” by
Kurt Schwitters, Burri’s compositions abandoned the ironic aspect to
give way to a wider dimension and a tragic vision, always subordinating
the qualities of roughness and casualness to the rigour of the
compositional structure underneath
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“Origin”
In 1951, together with Ettore Colla, Mario Ballocco and Giuseppe
Capogrossi. Burri founded the “Origin” group. Their manifesto exalted
the elementary qualities of painting, leaving aside the spatial illusion
and descriptive colour, even if Burri’s canvasses were inevitably
interpreted as images of landscapes, biological processes, ”living flesh”
as metaphors of rotten flesh and decadence. He was supported by the
critic J.J.Sweeney, who included him in the “Young European Painters”
exhibition at the Guggenheim Museum in New York and was the author of
the first monograph on the artist, published by the Obelisco Gallery in
1955.
America
The artist started to exhibit his works abroad in 1953. They were
accepted favourably by the critics; the exhibitions at the Frumkin
Gallery in Chicago and the Stable Gallery in New York promoted him to
being the most famous post-war Italian artist in America. Robert
Rauschenberg, after visiting his studio twice in 1953, started to
produce his first “combine paintings”
“Combustions”
The theme of metamorphosis induced Burri to burn, melt and char
materials in the “combustions” and “irons” at the end of the ‘fifties,
then in “woods” and “plastics” at the beginning of the ‘sixties. The
“cellotex” cycle started in 1975, tables composed of sawdust and glue
and he further deepened his search on dramatic forms and harsh colours
of synthetic materials.
Pure abstractionism
The combination of formal composition and casual process threw a bridge
between the informal art generation and that of impoverished art. The
work of Burri, together with that of Fontana has been the most original
and radical in Italy of the ‘Fifties, inspiring an art of pure
abstraction, independent from the gestural spontaneity of the European
informal trend.
Exhibitions
Many exhibitions have been organised with Burri’s works, both in Italy
and abroad; a wide retrospective exhibition of his work took place in
Milan in 1985. His more recent works have been shown at the Venice
Biennial exhibition in 1988.
The artist lives and works in Città di Castello and in Los Angeles.
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