Alberto Burri

Alberto Burri first discovered painting as a prisoner of war

Alberto Burri was born in Città de Castello on 12 March 1915. He initially wished to become a physician and emigrate to Africa, and so decided to study tropical medicine. On his graduation in Perugia in 1940, the Second World War was already in motion and his services as a young doctor were required elsewhere. During deployment in Tunisia, Alberto Burri was eventually captured and interned in an American prisoner-of-war camp in Hereford, Texas, where he began to paint out of boredom. Deeply disenchanted by war, he gave up medicine and turned to art. However, the disturbing war experiences accompanied the artist and shaped his work throughout his life. This revealed itself at first in the form of simple drawings of the horrors witnessed during the dark war years: faces distorted by pain, severe injuries to the point of mutilation, and time and again, the naked fear of deadly horror.  

Gloomy colours and a trail of destruction

The artist left soon left his figurative early phase behind, but the dystopian prevailing sentiment was retained in his work. And many of Alberto Burri’s works do resemble a battleground: dark, gloomy and broken – highlighted at most by a bloody red. They are primarily in the form of collages of various materials which the artist does not only juxtapose, but deliberately damages them beforehand: wood is charred, plastic is melted. Destruction is an omnipresent element in Alberto Burri’s pictures and forms the undisputed centre of his creative interest. The trail of destruction that runs through Burri’s colourless dystopia always points to zero hour, to the end of the war, to the moment in which something new can emerge from the all-pervading black of nothing. It is actually not destruction, then, but creation that is the major theme of the idiosyncratic Italian, who quickly gained the attention of the international art scene with this approach. 

Lively exhibition activity with quiet artworks

Alberto Burri held his first solo exhibition in 1947 in the Galleria La Margherita in Rome where he had lived and worked since 1945. The USA also noticed the innovative Italian artist and his material art was presented in the prestigious Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York in 1954. Burri took part in the Venice Biennale no less than seven times, and was a guest at documenta in Kassel three times. Alberto Burri received prizes and awards for his art including the Antonio Feltrinelli Prize in 1973. Despite this wide recognition, Burri was a representative of quiet art, which did not celebrate any spectacular successes, but became a reliable quantity for the initiated. Nevertheless, alongside his compatriot Lucio Fontana, the diligent Italian is considered the most important pioneer of Arte Povera. 

Alberto Burri died in Nice on 13 February 1995.