32 Facts About Alberto Burri

Alberto Burri is associated with the matterism of the European informal art movement and described his style as a polymaterialist.

Alberto Burri had connections with Lucio Fontana's spatialism and, with Antoni Tapies, an influence on the revival of the art of post-war assembly in the United States as in Europe.

Alberto Burri is enormously important in that postwar period and influential internationally.

Alberto Burri was born on 12 March 1915 in Citta di Castello, in Umbria to Pietro Burri, a tuscan wine merchant, and Carolina Torreggiani, an umbrian elementary school teacher.

In 1935, Alberto Burri attended a government High school in Arezzo living as a boarder in a pension, and as his school reports noted, he studied Classics at a private school in Citta di Castello.

Alberto Burri graduated from medical school in 1940, and on 12 October that year, two days after Italy's entrance into World War II, with a precocious voluntary experience in the Italo-Ethiopian War, was then recalled into military service, and sent to Libya as a combat medic.

Army records show that within 20 days of this order, Alberto Burri received a temporary discharge to allow him to complete his medical internship and gain the diploma to qualify as a medical doctor.

Alberto Burri claimed he studied art history, because he wanted to be able to understand the works of art that surrounded him.

Alberto Burri studied Greek, a language in which he became proficient, and later in life was able to read and enjoy Classical Greek literature.

Alberto Burri then exhibited at the Marlborough Gallery in New York and at the Gallery de France in Paris.

Alberto Burri moved to Rome as a guest of the violinist and composer Annibale Bucchi, his mother's cousin, who encouraged his activity as a painter.

Alberto Burri remained a reserved artist, ceaselessly working and creating, initially in a small studio in Via Margutta but frequently moving out.

In some artworks of the same period which he called Gobbi, Alberto Burri focused on the painting's spatial interaction, achieving another original outcome due to the incorporation of tree branches on the rear of the canvas which pushed two-dimensionality towards Three-dimensional space.

The formal artistic elegance and the spatial balances obtained through aeroform steams, craters, rips, overlapping color layers and different forms, differentiated Alberto Burri's art, founded on attentive reflections and precise calculations, from the impulsive gestures that characterized Action painting during the same period.

Alberto Burri offered an initial view of these peculiar elements in 1949, with SZ1 : the presence of a portion of the american flag contained in the artwork anticipated the use of the same subject made by pop art.

Alberto Burri's Sacchi did not win the public's understanding and were instead considered as extremely far from the notion of art.

Alberto Burri later recalled a common visit to an oil field as a strong influence for the artist's interest on the use of fire.

The best known application of this procedure was reached in the Plastiche during the Sixties, when a gradual critic openness towards Alberto Burri's art showed up in Italy as well.

Alberto Burri arrested the heating process at the desired moment using a PVA glue layer, thus obtaining greater and lesser cracking effects, which were always balanced thanks to the painter's extensive knowledge of chemistry.

Alberto Burri reproduced the procedure used for the Cretti, either black or white, in sculpture, on large extensions in the University of California, Los Angeles and Naples Grandi Cretti made of baked clay and, most importantly, in the vast cement covering of the Cretto di Alberto Burri at Gibellina, upon the ruins of the old small Sicilian town destroyed by the 1968 earthquake.

In 1963 Alberto Burri designed the sets for Spirituals, Morton Gould's ballet at La Scala, in Milan.

In 1973 Alberto Burri designed sets and costumes for November Steps, conceived by his wife Minsa Craig, with a score by Toru Takemitsu.

Alberto Burri never considered graphic art of secondary importance to painting.

Alberto Burri died childless on 13 February 1995 in Nice, in the French Riviera, where he had moved for the ease of living and because of a pulmonary emphysema.

The structure's black exterior and the particular space adaptations represent one last attempt by Alberto Burri to create a total work of art, in continuity with the idea of formal and psychological balance he constantly pursued.

Alberto Burri is recognized as a radical innovator of the second half of the twentieth century, as a precursor of the solutions found by such artistic movements as Arte Povera, Neo-Dada, Nouveau realisme, Postminimalism and process art, leaving open many critical interpretations and methodological interpretations of his work.

Alberto Burri's career began in Rome with a first solo exhibition in 1947 at La Margherita bookshop, owned by Irene Brin, where he presented his first abstract works the following year.

From 1953 on, Alberto Burri regularly exhibited his works in the United States, at the Allan Frumkin Gallery, the Stable Gallery and the Martha Jackson Gallery in New York.

Alberto Burri's initially seesawing relationship with the Venice Biennale marked its turning point in 1960, when he was offered his first solo area by Giulio Carlo Argan.

In 1994, Alberto Burri presented the cycle titled Alberto Burri The Athens Polyptych.

Alberto Burri's art has inspired many Italian directors, among which Michelangelo Antonioni, who drew inspiration from the painter's material research for his 1964 Red Desert.

In 1987 Alberto Burri created the official 1990 FIFA World Cup posters.