Exploring the beauty and complexity of the creative process that underlies Burri's works, the exhibition elects the artist as a protagonist of the post-World War II art scene, revising the traditional literature on cultural exchanges between the United States and Europe in the 50s it's 60s. Burri distanced himself from the pictorial surfaces and gestural style of both American Abstract Expressionism and European Informal Art, reworking singular pigments, humble materials and prefabricated elements. A transition link between collage and assemblage, Burri rarely resorted to the use of paint and brush, preferring the working of the surface by means of stitching, burning and lacerations, to name a few of his techniques. Using torn and mended jute sacks, canvases with humps in relief and melted industrial plastics, Burri's works often allude to human bodies, membranes and wounds, but they do so through a totally abstract language. The tactile quality of his work anticipates Postminimalism and the feminist art movement of the 60s, while his red, black and white “material monochromes” challenge the concepts of linguistic purity and simplification of forms typical of American formalist modernism.
Bringing together over 100 works, many of which have never been exhibited outside the Italian borders, the exhibition underlines how Burri attenuated the line between painting and plastic relief, creating a new poetics of painting-object which directly influenced Neo-Dadaism, the Process art and Arte Povera.
The exhibition Alberto Burri: The Trauma of Painting is organized by Emily Braun, Distinguished Professor at Hunter College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, Guest Curator of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, with the support of Megan Fontanella, Associate Curator for the Collections and Provenances of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, and by Carol Stringari, Deputy Director and Chief Conservator of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation who collaborated on the catalogue.
Richard Armstrong, Director of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and Foundation, commented “Through the skilful work of our team, led by Emily Braun, we are placing the accent on unprecedented aspects relating to Alberto Burri's innovative and experimental creative processes. Reanalyzing the Guggenheim's exhibitions and publications dedicated to Burri after the Second World War allows us to deepen our history with this important artist. We are pleased to be able to celebrate the centenary of Burri's birth through this important retrospective".
Alberto Burri: The Trauma of Painting was made possible thanks to the support of Lavazza.
We also thank The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts which supported this initiative and the generosity shown by the exhibition's Leadership Committee, chaired by Pilar Crespi Robert and by the board member Stephen Robert. Special thanks go to Maurice Kanbar, as well as Luxembourg & Dayan, the Richard Roth foundation, Isabella del Frate Rayburn, Sigifredo di Canossa, Dominique Lévy, Daniela Memmo d'Amelio, Samir Traboulsi, Alberto and Gioietta Vitale, and all those who prefer remain anonymous.
Additional funds were made available by Mapei Group, EL Wiegand Foundation, Mondriaan Fund, Italian Cultural Institute of New York, La FondazioneNY and the New York State Council on the Arts.
The Guggenheim Museum thanks the Palazzo Albizzini Burri Collection Foundation for its collaboration.
Francesca Lavazza said: "1915, the year Alberto Burri was born, represents a crucial moment in Italian history, i.e. the country's entry into the First World War, but at the same time marks the opening of the historic Lavazza headquarters in Turin . This year, Lavazza is honored to celebrate its 120th anniversary by supporting this extensive retrospective dedicated to one of the forerunners of Modernism. Lavazza stands alongside the Guggenheim in exhibiting Burri's works and witnessing his lasting influence on the artistic landscape on both sides of the Atlantic”.
Burri's best-known work is the Sacchi series made with the remains of torn, mended and patched jute sacks, sometimes combined with fragments of crumpled rags. Much less known to the American public are the artist's other series, treated in depth in this exhibition: Catrami, Muffe, Gobbi (canvases with humps in relief that jut out into space), Bianchi (monochromes), Legni (wood burning ), Ferri (reliefs made up of protuberances of prefabricated sheet metal pieces), Combustioni plastiche (sheets of molten plastic), Cretti (craquelure effect) and Cellotex (carved and decorticated chipboard).
The exhibition is revealed to the public along the ramps of the Guggenheim both chronologically and through Burri's artistic phases, reproducing the artist's journey through various supports, surfaces and colours. In fact, during his career Burri showed a particular interest in the history of painting, strengthened by a deep bond with Renaissance art due to his native land: Umbria. The exhibition also underlines the dialogue with the American minimalism that has shaped the artist's latest works. One section will be dedicated to the imposing work Grande cretto (1985–89), a Land Art-style memorial dedicated to the victims of the earthquake that struck the Sicilian town of Gibellina in 1968.
Born in Città di Castello (Perugia) in 1915, Burri studied medicine and served in North Africa as a medical officer in the Italian army during World War II. In 1943, following the capture of his unit in Tunisia, he was imprisoned in the prison camp of Hereford (Texas), where he began to paint. In 1946 Burri returned to Italy and devoted himself entirely to art, a decision born out of direct experience of war, privation and Italy's catastrophic defeat. His first one-man show, held in 1947 at the Galleria La Margherita in Rome, brought together landscapes and still lifes, but following a trip to Paris between 1948 and 1949 he began to experiment with tarry substances, ground pumice, industrial paints and structures metal to create accretions and gashes that devastated the integrity of the pictorial surface. Subsequently he tried to distort the deep structure of the painting by drilling, exposing and reconstituting the surface of the support. Instead of the traditional, untouched stretched canvas, Burri preferred to assemble his works starting from shreds of rags, fragments of wood veneer, welded aluminum sheets or layers of molten plastic, all in a process that led him to sew, fix, weld, stapling, gluing and burning materials. His work razed and reconfigured the Western pictorial tradition, while moving toward a reconceptualization of the scale and emotional power of modernist collage.
Burri married the American dancer Minsa Craig and in 1963 he began to spend every winter in the Los Angeles residence, but nevertheless he was always considered an Italian artist. In 1978 the artist established the Palazzo Albizzini Burri Collection Foundation in Città di Castello. The Burri Foundation is today active in two museum sites that exhibit works by Burri installed by the artist himself: Palazzo Albizzini and the Ex Seccatoi del Tabacco. The Foundation kindly lent two works belonging to its permanent exhibition: Grande Bianco (1952) and Grande Bianco (1956). The first work represents one of the three large textile collages that Robert Rauschenberg had seen in Burri's studio in Rome during a visit in early 1953. All three of these large works will be brought together in the exhibition.
In conjunction with the exhibition, the Guggenheim Museum conducted an in-depth conservation study of the works selected for the retrospective together with numerous other works drawn from Burri's various series. Thanks to a multidisciplinary team of curators, conservation experts and restorers of paintings, documents, artifacts and textiles, the studio has analyzed the enormous variety of original and complex materials and creative processes of the artist.
History of the exhibition Burri began his career in Rome but regularly staged some exhibitions in the United States from the early 50s, both in Chicago, at the Allan Frumkin Gallery, and in New York, at the Stable Gallery and Martha Jackson Gallery. In 1953 James Johnson Sweeney, director and curator of the Guggenheim Museum, included Burri in the important exhibition Young European Painters: A Selection and in 1955 he wrote the first monograph on the artist. Among the various prizes obtained are the Third Prize of the Carnegie International in Pittsburgh (1959), the Premio dell'Ariete in Milan (1959), the UNESCO Prize at the San Paolo Biennial (1959), the Critics' Prize for the personal own works at the Venice Biennale (1960), the Marzotto Prize (1965) and the Grand Prix at the San Paolo Biennale (1965). The first American retrospective was presented by the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston (1963). Major exhibitions include the retrospective at the Musée National d'Art Moderne in Paris (1972), the retrospective at the Frederick S. Wight Gallery of the University of California at Los Angeles (1977), and traveling to the Marion Koogler McNay Art Institute in San Antonio , Texas, and the Guggenheim Museum retrospective (1978). In 1994 he participated in the exhibition The Italian Metamorphosis, 1943–1968 also at the Guggenheim.
The exhibition will be accompanied by a series of public events, including visits to the exhibition, neorealist Italian films and two productions of Theater of War which foresee the reading of plays from Classical Greece on the theme of war with a view to creating ideas for a discussion of the visible and invisible wounds inflicted by war. On November 12 in the Museum Rotunda, the Guggenheim will also present a reinterpretation by the Tom Gold Dance company of November Steps, a 1973 ballet choreographed by Burri's wife, Minsa Craig, with sets and costumes by the same artist and music by Toru Takemitsu. Full details will be made available in the coming months at guggenheim.org/calendar.
