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Alberto Burri: The Trauma of Painting is the first retrospective
of this important Italian artist in nearly 40 years.
It takes his career from its origins in the postwar period,
all the way up through the 1990s.
It is a retrospective that covers all of his various series.
There are ten major series. Burri is an artist who worked very closely
with materials: found materials and also pristine ones.
And he recreated a whole new way of making pictures, or paintings.
The exhibition proceeds chronologically up through the
Frank Lloyd Wright rotunda, beginning in the late '40s.
And it finishes, actually, with a look at how his work at the very end
is actually similar in certain themes, and ideas, and approaches to its very beginnings.
What makes Burri different from the rest of this generation
is that he had no formal training in art. But he was soon exposed to abstract art,
first in the postwar Rome art scene, where he set up a studio.
And secondly, he had gone to Paris in 1948,
and he saw the works of Joan Miró and Jean Dubuffet and Jean Fautrier.
Tactility is what differentiates Burri from the rest of postwar European artists,
and American artists, for that matter. They're still painting.
In his early series, Burri is working with artist pigments and canvas,
and then with burlap bags. From his early exhibitions
Burri was labeled the artist of wounds. James Johnson Sweeney, for example,
in a very famous text, wrote that Burri created wounds in the picture
and stitched them up just like a surgeon, of course referring to Burri's
background as a doctor attending to the sick and wounded.
These are not illusionistic wounds. They're actual gashes and tears right in the fabric
of the picture. He also gouges into thick pigments and wounds it that way.
They relate to trauma: the trauma of Italy, of individuals, and all of postwar Europe.
We think of Burri as an artist who used cast-off or used materials.
That's true of the fabrics, the linens in his Bianchi, and also the sacks,
the burlap sacks. But in the mid-'50s, he changed to pristine materials.
And he rendered them damaged. He burned them with combustion. And then again,
he created marvelous fields of chiaroscuro and composition out of them.
The first material he actually burned, besides paper, was wood veneer.
This is the moment no longer of postwar devastation and recovery but
actually the reconstruction of Italy. Many of Burri's materials that he sets fire to
are things that were used in the construction industry.
Burri's next series of combustions used industrial plastic sheeting,
the so-called Combustioni plastiche. And they show a fantastic development
in his approach to the monochrome. And in his colorless plastic combustions,
he created a colorless monochrome, a painting that you can actually see through.
With his series of the Ferri, or irons, Burri also uses fire. In this case, welding.
He actually takes this cold-rolled steel right from the factory.
And he uses metal shears to cut them into reliefs. And he creates these jagged edges
and compositions of metal that he then nailed to a support and hung on a wall.
So again, we're confounding definitions of painting and sculptures.
Burri never goes off the wall. He's never going to deny the relationship to painting ever.
Nonetheless, he's always going to push the boundaries of what makes a painting.
James Johnson Sweeney, the second director of the Guggenheim Museum,
was one of the first critical champions of Alberto Burri's work.
He first met Burri in Rome in 1953. James Johnson Sweeney acquired one of
Burri's sacks. It was the first sack to enter an American museum collection.
James Johnson Sweeney then acquired a Legno for the Guggenheim Museum in 1957.
And around 1960 he acquired a Ferro from the Martha Jackson Gallery.
Burri sent Sweeney and his wife one of his little miniatures, which are completely
to-scale, beautifully proportioned versions of each of his series.
These are on view in the exhibition. Looking at a Burri picture demands time.
It demands contemplation. It makes you really aware of things going on
inside your own head. How you are feeling things. How you want to touch
these pictures, even though you can't. What makes them still paintings
or what doesn't make them a painting anymore.
