Alberto Burri's artwork

Alberto Burri (Città di Castello 1915 – Nizza 1995)

As he teaches us the renowned art critic Brandi, Alberto Burri having completed his medical studies in 1940, he was taken prisoner during the war and interned in Herefors camp, where he began to paint. In 1946 he settled in Rome.

In 1949, in Paris, he exhibited at the “New Realities ” Salon.

From the same period date the first Catrami (Tar) and Muffe (Mold).

In 1950 he founded the Origine group and created the first Sacco (Bag).

The painted canvas, scraped and immersed in glue, is covered with used linen, as in a shroud, where tears, holes, patches, abrasions and scratches, make you think of aerial views of cultivated land.

From 1953, he exhibited continuously in America, France and Italy.

If the rags are metaphors for bloody human flesh, the Combustioni (1957), thin superimposed layers of plastic violated by the flames, confirm in an extremely refined way, the theme of the wound and moral laceration more than physical.

In 1957 he exhibited the Legni (Wood), and in 1958 the Ferri  industrial sheets, flagellated by heat, eaten away by rust, which tend with the intrinsic rigidity of the material used, to partly absorb the expressionism of previous works.

In the 1970s, with Cellotex, he used sawdust pressed with glue, and in Cretti, he used resins which, when dried, produced crevices similar to those of the earth dried up by the sun.

The process is based on the same principle as mosaic or ancient Chinese ceramic, where the cracking of the surface varnish was used as a rhythmic principle.