“Alberto Burri: The Trauma of Painting”. For the first time in the United States of America the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York is celebrating a great retrospective – the largest and most complete exhibition in the last thirty-five years with more than one hundred works, most of which have never left Italy – of the works of Alberto Burri upon the centenary of his birth (Citta’ di Castello March 12th 1915 – Nice February 13th 1995). The exhibition, which will be open until January 6th 2016, organised
by Emily Braun, Guest Curator of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, has been made possible and is supported by Lavazza.
The exhibition starts off from the famed ramps of the Museum designed by Frank Lloyd Wright in 1943. It continues by chronologically reporting the career of the artist and his works which were later influenced by a whole host of supports and materials utilised over the following years. Burri never dwelled upon artistic discovery that was contemporary to his time (in particular, American abstract Expressionism and Informal Art). He was however a pioneer in terms of those movements that were about to burst onto the scene: the New Dadas (the Hunchbacks, pushed forward by metallic structures entrapped within the canvas, signalling the forthcoming quest for three-dimensionality of a work in relation to space) and Pop Art.
The exhibition starts off from the Sacks of torn jute, sewn back together, at times put back together again with other materials that are stained in the dullest of colours – blackish blue or red like the blood of the mutilated bodies that were witnessed by a medical doctor in the Italian Army in the Second World War.
Successive series were less well-known to the American public and are thus examined more closely in the exhibition. One series expresses an internal torment that is revealed in the choice of the materials used and the difficulty involved in combining them. Apart from the Sacks, Woods, Irons and Plastics used upon which the artist violently worked with his Combustioni there is a second series which is more relaxed, almost calm, remote from the deep marks left by war, in which material is still at the centre of the artist’s quest but never more so aggressive – like the pure materialistic monochromes, the Cretti in which the peeling effect appears “designed” and the Cellotex, an industrial material that left the artist free to exploit all its very unique effects.
This exhibition reveals Burri, if ever there was any need, as one of the main protagonists of the international art scene in the years following the Second World War. The exhibition extols the beauty of his works and the fascinating and wholly unique creative quest that he undertook during his life.
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