ALBERTO BURRI ©

ALBERTO BURRI

Alberto Burri was born in Città di Castello, in the province of Perugia, in 1915. He graduated in Medicine in 1940 and, enlisted as a medical officer, participated in war operations in North Africa. Taken prisoner in 1943 in Tunisia by the British, he was later sent to the American concentration camp in Hereford, Texas, where he began painting. Returning to Italy, he settled in Rome in 1946 to devote himself to painting. In 1947 he had his first solo exhibition at Gaspero del Corso and Irene Brin's La Margherita gallery, with works that were still figurative in nature. In his second solo exhibition, Bianchi e Catrami, also at the La Margherita gallery, in May 1948, he offers abstract works for the first time. Subsequently he began to elaborate the first Catrami. In 1949 he made SZ1, the first printed Sacco. In January 1951 he participated in the founding of the Origine Group, together with Mario Ballocco, Giuseppe Capogrossi and Ettore Colla, and participated in the group's inaugural exhibition, which disbanded the following year. 1952 opened with the solo exhibition Neri e Muffe, at the Galleria dell'Obelisco in Rome. Later in the year he moved to Via Margutta: Robert Rauschenberg, present in Rome for almost a year, visited Alberto Burri's studio, thus being able to see Sacchi. With the Chicago and New York exhibitions of 1953, international success began. Alberto Burri: paintings and collages is the title of his first American solo exhibition, held at the Allan Frumkin Gallery in Chicago between January and February 1953, then transferred at the end of the year to Eleanor Ward's New York-based Stable Gallery. Meanwhile, Burri met critic James Johnson Sweeney, then director of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York, who invited him to the Younger European Painters exhibition at the Guggenheim Museum in New York. This was followed, in 1955, by his participation in The New Decade: 22 European Painters and Sculptors at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, in the International Exhibition at the Carnegie Institute in Pittsburgh, and in the São Paulo Biennial in Brazil. The solo show at the Fine Art Center in Colorado Springs confirmed Alberto Burri's growing fortunes in America, supported by Sweeney, who signed the artist's first monograph that year. On May 15, 1955, he married, in Westport, California, Ukrainian-born American dancer Minsa Craig, whom he had met in Rome the previous year. Burri, meanwhile, continued to make numerous Combustions (with wood, canvas and plastic) and experimented with the characteristics of wood. 1956 and 1957 are punctuated by numerous solo exhibitions in Europe and the United States. Toward the end of 1957 he makes his first Irons, in which he exploits the possibilities offered by the welding technique in the context of a two-dimensional work. Exhibition activity is quite intense in 1959 and early 1960. In June Burri gets a room at the Venice Biennale, where he receives the prize of the International Association of Art Critics. In the same year Giovanni Carandente made the first documentary of his work. A long journey between Mexico and the United States and the aftermath of a delicate surgery slowed his production, although he continued to exhibit in solo and group shows. In the early 1960s there are in close succession, in Paris, Rome, L'Aquila, Livorno, and then in Houston, Minneapolis, Buffalo, Pasadena, the first anthological recapitulations which, with the new contribution of Plastics, become true retrospectives in Darmstadt, Rotterdam, Turin and Paris (1967-1972). Between December 1962 and January 1963, the Marlborough gallery in Rome hosted an exhibition devoted to the Plastiche, which, after the Ferri, represented a new, and unexpected, turning point. In the late 1960s he bought a house in Los Angeles, California, where he spent the winter months until 1990. The 1970s recorded a gradual rarefaction of technical and formal means and a renewed commitment to monumental solutions. In 1973 the Cretti cycle began. In 1976 Alberto Burri made the Grande Cretto Nero exhibited in the Franklin D. Sculpture Garden. Murphy at the University of Los Angeles (UCLA). Another similar work is exhibited in Naples, in the Capodimonte Museum. The most spectacular development, however, is the one in Gibellina (Trapani), of nearly 90,000 m² on the rubble of the old Gibellina. Work began in August 1985 and was halted in December 1989 due to lack of funds. In 1977 he exhibited in a major anthological exhibition at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York. Cycles conceived with a polyphonic structure include Il Viaggio (1979), presented in Città di Castello and then Munich, Orti (1980) in Florence, Sestante (1982 c. ) in Venice, Annottarsi (1984-86) at the Sprovieri Gallery in Rome and Annottarsi 2 (1987) at the 1988 Venice Biennale; as well as the large installations currently exhibited at the Ex Seccatoi del Tabacco in Città di Castello, where, on his initiative, the Fondazione Palazzo Albizzini Collezione Burri was established, responsible for the study and protection of the artist's work. In the early 1990s, Alberto Burri and his wife Minsa Craig left California and settled in Beaulieu-sur-Mer, Côte d'Azur, France. Despite his advanced age, he continued to experiment with new materials: his last work was Metamorfex, a cycle of nine works presented, by his friend Nemo Sarteanesi, in the Ex Seccatoi. Burri died in Nice on February 13, 1995.