Collection: Burri Alberto

(Città di Castello 1915 - Nice 1995)

Among the leading figures of late twentieth-century art, Alberto Burri arrived at painting through a very unique path. Graduated in medicine, it was during his imprisonment at the Hereford camp in Texas that in 1944 he began to paint, definitively abandoning the medical profession upon his return to Italy. From the start, his research focused on material: no longer represented, but made the absolute protagonist of the work. Thus were born the cycles that marked the history of informal art: the Catrami, the Muffe, the Gobbi, and above all the famous Sacchi, in which the torn and sewn jute canvas becomes the image.
In the following years, Burri extended his investigation to various materials: the Combustions, the Woods and Plastics burned by fire, the welded Irons, up to the Cretti of the Seventies and the Cellotex of full maturity. He is also the author of one of the greatest environmental works of the century, the Grande Cretto of Gibellina, laid over the ruins of the town destroyed by the earthquake.
Alongside painting, Burri cultivated graphic work with equal rigor, which he considered an integral and not secondary part of his research. Screenprints, aquatints, and engravings translate onto paper the obsession with material and surface: through embossing, textures, and reliefs, the print does not reproduce the painting but extends the investigation with its own means. Fundamental in this regard was the long collaboration with the Roman printshop 2RC, which allowed the artist to produce multiples of the highest technical quality.
The entire body of work is today documented in the general catalog Burri. Grafica. Opera completa, edited by Maurizio Calvesi and Chiara Sarteanesi (Fondazione Palazzo Albizzini, Città di Castello). His works are preserved in the main museums of the world.