ALBERTO BURRI ITALIAN ABSTRACT ARTIST

ALBERTO BURRI

(1915 - 1995 ITALY)

Composition (Composizione), 1953. Oil, gold paint, and glue on burlap and canvas, 33 7/8 x 39 1/2 inches (86 x 100.4 cm). Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York  53.1364. © 2012 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / SIAE, Rome

 An Italian abstract painter and sculptor. Città di Castello (Italy) has memorialized him with a large permanent museum of his works.

Burri earned a medical degree in 1940 and was a military physician during World War II. He was interned to prisoner-of-war camp in Texas in 1944, where he began to paint. After his release in 1946, Burri moved to Rome; his first solo show was at the Galleria La Margherita in 1947.

Burri soon turned to abstraction and unorthodox materials, making collages with pumice, tar, and burlap, and started a series of canvases that bulged into the 3rd dimension. In the mid-1950s, Burri began producing charred wood and burlap works, then welded iron sheets. In the early 1960s he was burning plastic, and in the early 1970s started his "cracked" paintings, or cretti. He created a series of works in the industrial material, Cellotex, from 1979 through the 1990s.

http://www.fondazioneburri.org/