White Black Cellotex, 1969, acrylic on Cellotex, 61 1/32 × 39 3/8 in.
©Foto Massimo Listri
Alberto Burri (Città di Castello 1915 – Nice 1995)
After graduating in medicine, he began painting as a prisoner during the Second World War. In 1948 he made his first forays into abstract art with the use of extra-pictorial materials. In 1951 he was one of the founder members of the Origine group in Rome. The series Bianchi (Whites), Catrami (Tars), Gobbi (Hunchbacks), Muffe (Molds) and Sacchi (Sacks) of the early 1950s were followed by Combustioni (Combustions), Ferri (Irons) and Legni (Woods); the 1960s saw his Plastiche (Plastics), while the Cretti (Cracks) and Cellotex works characterized the last twenty years of his activity. Burri’s stylistic revolution influenced many artistic movements of the 1960s and 1970s, not only in Italy. In 1978 he created the Burri Foundation in Città di Castello. In 1985 he started working on the Grande cretto (Great Crack), a landscape work sculpted over the ruins of Gibellina. He exhibited in many editions of the Venice Biennale: from 1952 to 1960, when he won the AICA Prize, again in 1966 and 1968, from 1984 to 1988, and in 1995. His solo shows included the first at the Carnegie Institute in Pittsburgh in 1957, which traveled around the USA, followed by shows in 1959 at the Palais des Beaux-Arts in Brussels and at the Museum Haus Lange in Krefeld. He took part in Documenta in Kassel in 1959, 1964 and 1982; in 1965 he won the Grand Prize at the São Paulo Art Biennial. Retrospectives include those held in 1976 at GNAM, in 1978 at the Guggenheim in New York and in 1996 at Palazzo delle Esposizioni in Rome. The Guggenheim honored him one more time in 2015, on the 100-year anniversary of his birth.
Alberto Burri’s work White Black Cellotex is an emblematic acrylic painting. The Umbrian artist stood out in the second half of the 20th century for his use of innovative materials, not traditionally employed in art, with which he created his revolutionary works. In addition to Cellotex, the sound-absorbing wooden compound that he used for this painting, Burri worked with tar, pumice stone, burlap sacks, plastic, wood, iron sheet, kaolin and gold leaf, often using unconventional tools such as sewing needles, propane gas flame, vinyl glue, palette knives, cutting blades and more. Particularly in his Cellotex-based pieces, working the surface through peeling, carving and other operations with vinyl glue, Burri made the different areas of the support sensitive to paint and to the play of color and light. Before painting the surface, he would treat its different parts using distinct methods: in this way, though he applied only a single color on the support, he obtained varying levels of opacity and luminosity, as well as very intense chromatic effects. In its chromatic antinomy, this work expresses a radical formal minimalism, while echoing and renewing notions dating back to the great humanistic tradition of Italian and European Renaissance painting of the 15th and 16th centuries. In this stage of his work, Burri moved away from the dramatic use of material that characterized his production in the 1950s, achieving a formal reordering of tensions, also evidenced by his works of the same period now kept in the Uffizi Gallery. (Bruno Corà)