Words are of no help to me when I try to talk about my painting. It is an irrepressible presence that refuses to be translated into any other form of expression. It is a presence that is both imminent and active. This is what it means: to exist as well as to paint. My painting is a reality that is part of myself, a reality that I cannot reveal in words.
Alberto Burri was born in Città di Castello (Perugia) on the 12 March 1915. He graduated from University with a degree in Medicine in 1940. Enrolled in the Italian Army as a Medical Officer, he was taken prisoner by the Allied Forces in Tunisia in 1943 and sent as a prisoner of war to a camp in Hereford, Texas. It was there that he started painting. Cesare Brandi wrote of the cathartic experience that the exercise of painting had on the artist during his imprisonment: “locked up in the camp…refusing the exercise of that activity [medicine], painting, which had been on the remotest horizon of his life, came to offer itself first as laziness and leisure and gradually, as a substitute for action, then as action itself”.
Upon returning to Italy in 1946, he settled in Rome and devoted himself to painting. In 1947 and 1948, he held his first personal exhibitions in Rome (Galleria La Margherita). In 1951, he was involved in the foundation of the “Origine” group with Ballocco, Capogrossi and Colla. The document describes the desire to overcome historical abstractionism and how “the group’s artists express the need for a rigorous, coherent vision, full of energy. But, above all, anti-decorative […]”. These were crucial years in which the artist isolated matter, worked on superimpositions, on gloss and matt surfaces, the first inserts.
In 1949, a fragment of sack (SZ1) appeared for the first time, a theme that the artist would go on to develop fully in the years that followed. It was in 1953 that the artist presented lo scandalo e la gloria prima, his work at the Guggenheim in New York: the Sacchi (Sacks), presented in solo exhibitions which, after New York, were held in Chicago, Colorado Springs, Oakland, Seattle, Sao Paulo, Paris, Milan, Bologna, Turin, Pittsburgh, Buffalo and San Francisco.
At the turn of the 1950s, the subsequent appointments with the public (Venice, Rome, London, New York, Brussels, Krefeld, Vienna, Kassel) featured the Legni (Woods), the Combustioni (Combustions), the Ferri (Irons), in an ongoing experimentation with matter. Real, human, anthropic matter that becomes the subject of the work, ascending to form.
At the beginning of the 1960s, the first anthological recapitulations took place in close succession in Paris, Rome, L’Aquila and Livorno, and then in Houston, Minneapolis, Buffalo and Pasadena, and with the new contribution of the Plastiche (Plastics), became true historical retrospectives in Darmstadt, Rotterdam, Turin and Paris (1967-1972).
In the early 1970s Burri began a new series of works, the Cretti (Cracks), which, in their physical and visual restitution, confront us with the origin of the energy of a surface, bringing to mind the image of a geological phenomenon. These works are made with kaolin, resins, pigment and glue. Their genesis is linked to the artist’s relationship with California, where from 1968, for several years, he resided in Los Angeles, especially during the winter months: “Quando ero in California, andavo spesso a visitare il Deserto della Morte. “When I was in California, I often went to visit Death Valley. The idea came from there, but then in the painting it became something else. I only wanted to demonstrate the energy of a surface”.
In an interesting paradox, the Cretti represent the final, fixed outcome on a support of a deconstruction that generates construction, just as in the Combustioni of the 1950s, matter becomes form by reverting to nothing.
After scandal and rejection by a significant portion of the critics, Burri achieved unqualified success in the 1960s and this was consolidated at the turn of the 1970s. Meanwhile, however, his vision seemed to calm down; it set aside the dramatic accents of informal research, while retaining all its solemnity and breadth, as the historical retrospectives continued: Assisi, Rome, Lisbon, Madrid, Los Angeles, San Antonio, Milwaukee, New York, Naples.
The decade from the mid-1980s to the year of Burri’s death was dominated by paintings entitled Nero (Black) or Annottarsi (Up to Nite). A disturbing and evocative expression “annottarsi”, which is like saying “to become night”, to venture into the night. For Burri, now in his seventieth year, it was also a “becoming night” of his existence, a movement towards the extreme threshold. Black, a hue often combined with red, starting with the sacks, or in later years, with gold, in a combination of powerful expressiveness that can also be seen in the “cellotex”, now occupied almost his entire imagination.
In 1989, Fondazione Palazzo Albizzini acquired the Ex Seccatoi del Tabacco, a complex of industrial warehouses used for drying tobacco until the 1960s. These unrepeatable architectures, of unusual size, painted completely black on the outside at Burri’s request, became a gigantic sculpture, an ideal container for the large pictorial cycles such as Il Viaggio (The Journey), Annottarsi (Up to Nite), Rosso e Nero (Red and Black), Non Ama il Nero (He Doesn’t Love Black). These and numerous other works, including the three sculptures Grande Ferro Sestante, Grande Ferro K, Ferro U, located at the entrance to the Ex Seccatoi del Tabacco, were donated by the artist to Città di Castello to complete the first nucleus in Palazzo Albizzini. In 1990, Fondazione Palazzo Albizzini published a very large volume with documentation of about 2000 works by the artist (Burri contributi al Catalogo Sistematico).
In 1991, a large retrospective exhibition, organised by the Pinacoteca Nazionale di Bologna, was set up at Palazzo Pepoli Campogrande in Bologna, where his very small works were exhibited for the first time. The exhibition then moved on to Locarno, where it was hosted at the Pinacoteca Comunale Casa Rusca. At the same time, Rivoli Castle presented 20 unpublished Cellotex works. Also in 1991, Burri exhibited at the Mixografia Gallery in Los Angeles. In 1992, the Metamorfotex cycle was presented to the public at the Ex Seccatoi del Tabacco in Città di Castello, and Fondazione Palazzo Albizzini presented the Ex Seccatoi del Tabacco catalogue, with an updated bibliography. In the same year, the Sapone Gallery in Nice exhibited Burri’s works again at F.I.A.C. in Paris at the Grand Palais, this time with paintings from 1949 to 1992; the Galleria delle Arti in Città di Castello hosted an exhibition of graphics. The Obalne Galerije in Piran and the Moderna Galerija in Ljubljana exhibited a retrospective of graphic works (from 1962 to 1981) between 1992 and 1993.
In 1993, a new cycle, entitled Il Nero e l’Oro (The Black and the Gold), consisting of 10 Cellotex works, was opened to the public at the Ex Seccatoi del Tabacco. In the same year, a large ceramic work bearing the same title Il Nero e l’Oro (The Black and the Gold) was created for Faenza and displayed at the Museo Internazionale delle Ceramiche, a gift from the artist to the city. Also in 1993, Burri’s graphic works were exhibited at the Museo delle Genti d’Abruzzo in Pescara. In 1994, Burri took part in the exhibition The Italian Metamorphosis 1943-1968 at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York. From 11 May to 31 June 1994 the cycle entitled Burri il Polittico di Atene, Architetture con Cactus (Burri the Athens Polyptych, Architectures with Cactus) was presented at the National Art Gallery in Athens and was later exhibited at the Italian Cultural Institute in Madrid (1995). Burri’s donation to the Uffizi in Florence, including a Bianco Nero painting from 1969 and three series of graphics dated 1993-94, was celebrated on 10 December 1994.
Alberto Burri died in Nice on the 13th of February 1995.
Sources:
The new decade: 22 European painters and sculptors, exhibition catalogue, New York Museum of Modern Art, 1955
Cesare Brandi, Burri, 1963
Germano Celant, L’inferno dell’arte italiana, 1996
Cesare Brandi, Burri, 1963
Maurizio Calvesi, Percorso di Burri, s.d.
https://www.fondazioneburri.org/
