Alberto Burri

Private Collection, Italy (acquired directly from the artist in the 1950s)

Cesare Brandi and Vittorio Rubiu, Burri, Rome 1963, p. 186, no. 34, illustrated

Fondazione di Palazzo Albizzini, Ed., Burri: Contributi al Catalogo Sistematico, Città di Castello 1990, p. 25, no. 62, illustrated in colour

Colour: The colours in the catalogue illustration are fairly accurate, although the overall tonality is cooler with less brown undertones in the original. Condition: This work is in good condition. The canvas has been lined. There are thin tension cracks to all four edges. Close inspection reveals some hairline drying cracks throughout with some associated losses to the upper and lower centre of the composition. Examination under ultra-violet light reveals retouchings along the edges and other areas of the composition, notably in the upper left quadrant.
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An exceptionally early consummation of Alberto Burri’s revolutionary transformation of the concept of painting, Bianco stands as a work of pivotal innovation within the artist’s highly acclaimed oeuvre. Considered one of the most pioneering artists of the post-war era, Burri’s unique artistic methodology and radical appropriation of ‘poor’ materials had a strong influence both in Europe and in America, as was evident in the budding Arte Povera movement, as well as in Robert Rauschenberg’s Combine series. Executed in 1951, Bianco stems from an important early stage in Burri’s career when the artist first began to subversively employ matter as the subject of his painting, looking to the limitless potential of materiality as a vehicle for artistic expression. Rugged landscapes of sumptuous textures, these early works rank amongst the most important of Burri’s seminal artistic practice.

In contrast to the white purity suggested by its title, Bianco is a work of strong tonal divergences and nuanced topography. A conglomeration of the artist’s exploratory material methodology Bianco bears aesthetic reference to several of his most revered series. With its patchwork of rectilinear fields of earthy colours the work alludes to the material fragments of Burri’s acclaimed Sacchi, whilst its arid areas of white impasto anticipate the measured craquelure of his later Cretto works. Horizontal drips have formed a matrix of fine lines that sit like a natural gauze on stretches of shimmering grey, dusty brown and marbled cream. Burri employs an agenda of minimal artistic intervention as a means of exposing the primary naturalness of materiality. This reductive autonomy stands in correlation to the contemporaneous work of Lucio Fontana, whilst inspiring and pre-figuring Piero Manzoni and Enrico Castellani in their quest for a dematerialization of the artwork as substantive of the real.  In this respect Burri's work, alongside that of Fontana, can be posited as the most radical of the 1950s in Italy; combining formal composition and random processes to bridge the generation of the Informel to the 1960s innovation of Arte Povera.

The vicissitudes of the artist's biography and political climate in Italy during the immediate post-war years, posit Burri's practice as a visceral response to the Second World War. The artist first turned to art during a year of imprisonment in an American POW camp in Hereford, Texas, when serving as a medical officer in the Italian army during World War II. After returning he traded his medical profession for that of a painter. Recalling the eviscerated arid landscape of the Texan desert Bianco is an elegant summation of this affecting period.

Reaching a perfect equilibrium between the sensuality of texture and the balance of composition, the present work epitomises Burri's revolutionary methodology and reassessment of the traditional rules of painting.  An exceptionally early composite of his most celebrated and important work, Bianco stands as a work of pivotal innovation within the highly acclaimed oeuvre of Alberto Burri.