The Santa Monica Museum of Art presents Combustione: Alberto Burri and America. A seminal artistic figure of the 20th Century, Alberto Burri (1915–1995) was a forebear to many artists and artistic movements— from Pop Art to Arte Povera—both in Italy and the United States. Combustione: Alberto Burri and America opens on September 11 and continues through December 18, 2010.
Alberto Burri (1915–1995) was a seminal artistic figure of the 20th Century, a forebear to many artists and artistic movements—from Pop Art to Arte Povera—both in Italy and the United States. Burri’s fame is great in his native Italy, but he remains relatively unknown in the United States, despite the fact that for over 25 years he would winter in his home in the Hollywood Hills, where he produced more than 60 major works of art. Combustione: Alberto Burri and America—a tightly focused exhibition featuring 40 major works from 1951 to 1990—will pay particular attention to both his reception and his production in the United States.
Burri’s biography links him closely with the United States. While a doctor in the Italian army during WWII, Burri was taken captive in Tunisia by U.S. troops and detained at Camp Howze, a prisoner-of-war facility in Hereford, Texas. At some point during his captivity, Burri began drawing and painting. This happenstance initiated his five-decade-long career.
After the war, Burri completely rejected his medical training, and with no formal instruction embarked on a career as an artist. Though he began as a painter, he soon abandoned traditional materials in favor of the creative reuse of mundane objects. The appearance of his Sacchi series in the early 1950s, which incorporated burlap material from military and Marshall Plan supply sacks, represented a radical shift in modernist art-making. Burri innovatively used the discarded debris of everyday life and utilitarian materials such as tar, sheet metal, plastic, and wood which he transformed by tearing and stitching, burning and pulling, giving the appearance that his only intervention was to bring out the natural colors, textures, and shapes already inherent in the material.
This landmark exhibition of Burri’s works will look at the spectrum of Burri’s work with an emphasis on his productivity within the United States, defining Burri’s importance as an artist for a new generation of Americans. Combustione will highlight projects that occupied Burri in the twenty-five-year period during which he worked in L.A.
Image: Alberto Burri, Grande Bianco Plastica, 1962, plastic, combustion on aluminum frame, 190 x 200 cm, Fondazione Palazzo Albizzini, Collezione Burri
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