Alberto Burri: The Trauma of Painting

by Emily Braun and Megan M. Fontanella

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Book cover for Alberto Burri: The Trauma of Painting

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Published to accompany a major retrospective exhibition - the first in the United States in more than 35 years and the most comprehensive ever mounted - this title showcases the pioneering work of Italian artist Alberto Burri (1915-1995). Exploring the beauty and complexity of Burri's process-based works, the exhibition positions the artist as a central and singular protagonist of postwar art. Burri is best known for his series of Sacchi (sacks) made of stitched and patched remnants of torn burlap bags, often combined with fragments of discarded clothing. Far less familiar are his other series, which this exhibition represents in depth: Catrami (tars), Gobbi (hunchbacks), Muffe (molds), Bianchi (whites), Legni (woods), Ferri (irons), Combustioni plastiche (plastic combustions), Cretti and Cellotex works. Burri's work both demolished and reconfigured the Western pictorial tradition, while reconceptualizing modernist collage. Using unconventional materials, he moved beyond the painted surfaces and mark making of American Abstract Expressionism and European Art Informel.
Burri's unprecedented approaches to manipulating humble substances - and his abject picture-objects - also profoundly influenced Arte Povera, Neo-Dada and Process art.
  • ISBN10 0892075236
  • ISBN13 9780892075232
  • Publish Date 27 October 2015
  • Publish Status Out of Print
  • Out of Print 7 June 2016
  • Publish Country US
  • Imprint Guggenheim Museum Publications,U.S.
  • Format Hardcover
  • Pages 280
  • Language English