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Artist or Maker: Alberto Burri (1915-1995)
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Provenance: Mrs. Minsa Craig Burri.
A gift from the above to her brother, and then by descent.
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Notes: Alberto Burri's artistic career began in a most unconventional manner. During the Second World War, Burri served in North Africa as an army doctor and was captured by the allied forces and sent to a detention camp in Hereford, Texas. In captivity he turned to art using whatever materials came to hand. This first encounter with everyday materials was to mark his work throughout his lifetime.
By placing everyday materials in an artistic context- on a pedestal, as it were- Burri was bringing the viewer's attention to its inherent qualities, beauty and dignity. These humble, sometimes modern materials became the sensual heroes of Burri's art. His use of plastic especially, which had only become widely available during the Post-War period, posed a deliberate challenge to the hegemony of artistic materials.
Burri showed a poet's wonderment in his celebration of the raw, fundamental matter of the 20th Century. His love of the materials is infectious, reflected in the sensuality of his works of the 1950s and the 1960s. There is also a poetry in the transformations that allowed him to chart, capture or even stop time, depending on the work. His Combustioni bear the sudden scars of the flames with which Burri had burnt them.
In this sense, it is not only in terms of the material that each work is unique, but also in terms of its being the precise product of a certain moment or length of time, a factor that Burri himself stressed: 'For each of these paintings, always a bit unexpected, we can always say: this is a work that could only have been done today, this is an action that could only have been performed today, not yesterday, not tomorrow' (E. Villa, 1953, quoted in Burri: La Misura e il Fenomeno, exh. cat., Milan 1999, p. 141).
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