Alberto Burri

Alberto Burri

MITCHELL-INNES & NASH

On his release from the Texas internment camp where he was held as a prisoner of war from 1944 to 1946 (having served with the Italian army in North Africa), Alberto Burri embarked on a practice of postpainterly abstraction rooted in a commitment to scabrous materiality. From 1949 onward he employed wood, plastic, and burlap-often burning or suturing them-as well as mud and dirt to generate surfaces that mark an intersection of formalism, or rather formlessness, and a confrontation with history. seeming on the one hand closed to interpretation by the utter opacity of filthy matter, these works on the other hand suggest a metaphorics of …