Alberto Burri
b.
1915, Città di Castello, Italy; d. 1995, Nice
Alberto Burri was born March 12, 1915, in Città di
Castello, Italy. Burri began not as an artist but as a doctor, earning
his medical degree in 1940 from the University of Perugia and serving as
a physician during World War II. Following his unit’s capture in
northern Africa, he was interned in a prisoner-of-war camp in Hereford,
Texas, in 1944, where he started to paint on the burlap that was at
hand. After his release in 1946, Burri moved to Rome, where his first
solo show was held at the Galleria La Margherita the following year.
Like many
Italian artists of his generation who reacted against the politicized
realism popular in the late 1940s, Burri soon turned to abstraction,
becoming a proponent of
Art Informel. Around 1949–50, Burri
experimented with various unorthodox materials, fabricating tactile
collages with pumice, tar, and burlap. At this time, he also commenced
the “mold” series and the “hunchback” series; the latter were humped
canvases that broke with the traditional two-dimensional plane. This
preoccupation with the ambiguity of the pictorial surface and with
non-art materials led Burri to help start Gruppo Origine, founded by
Italian artists in 1950 in opposition to the increasingly decorative
nature of abstraction. The artists in Gruppo Origine exhibited their
work together in 1951 at the Galleria dell’Obelisco, Rome.
In 1953, Burri garnered attention in the United
States: his work was included in the group exhibition Younger
European Painters at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, and
was shown as well at the Frumkin Gallery, Chicago, and the Stable
Gallery, New York. In the mid-1950s, Burri began burning his mediums, a
technique he termed combustione. These charred wood and burlap
works were first exhibited in 1957 at the Galleria dell’Obelisco. In
1958, his welded iron sheets were shown at the Galleria Blu, Milan. In
this same year, Burri was awarded Third Prize at the Carnegie
International, Pittsburgh. In 1959, he won the Premio dell’Ariete in
Milan and the UNESCO Prize at the Sгo Paulo Bienal. There was a
solo show of Burri’s art in 1960 at the Venice Biennale, where he
was awarded the Critics’ Prize.
Persevering with the combustione technique,
Burri started to burn plastic in the early 1960s. These works were
exhibited in 1962 at the Marlborough Galleria, Rome. Burri’s first
retrospective in the United States was presented by the Museum of Fine
Arts, Houston, in 1963. His art was selected for the traveling Premio
Marzotto exhibition of 1964–65, for which he won the prize in 1965,
the same year in which he was awarded the Grand Prize at the Sгo Paolo
Bienal. The art historian Maurizio Calvesi wrote a monograph on
Burri in 1971. The subsequent year, the Musée National d’Art Moderne,
Paris, dedicated a retrospective to Burri. In the early 1970s, Burri
embarked upon the “cracked” paintings series, creviced earthlike
surfaces that play with notions of trompe l’oeil. A retrospective of
Burri’s work was inaugurated at the University of California’s Frederick
S. Wight Gallery, Los Angeles, in 1977; it traveled to the Marion
Koogler McNay Art Institute, San Antonio, and the Solomon R. Guggenheim
Museum, New York, in 1978.
Burri turned to another industrial material, Cellotex,
in 1979, and continued to use it throughout the 1980s and 1990s. In
1994, the Italian Order of Merit was bestowed upon Burri. The artist
died February 15, 1995, in Nice.
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