Alberto Burri valuation
A doctor who came out of a prisoner-of-war camp and began stitching, burning and cracking his materials.
Alberto Burri was born at Citta di Castello in Umbria in 1915 and qualified as a physician.
What a work by Alberto Burri is worth
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Bio
Alberto Burri was born at Citta di Castello in Umbria in 1915 and qualified as a physician. Captured in North Africa in 1943, he began to paint in a prisoner-of-war camp in Hereford, Texas, on the only support available, and never practised medicine again. The work that followed is organised by material rather than by image: the Sacchi of stitched and patched burlap sacking, the Combustioni made by burning plastic sheet with a blowtorch, the Legni of charred wood, the Ferri of welded steel, and finally the Cretti, great white surfaces of kaolin and resin cracked like dried mud. He died in 1995.
Because the materials were chosen for what they do rather than for permanence, condition is more central here than with almost any contemporary of his: plastic embrittles and discolours, burlap slackens and tears at the stitching, and cretti surfaces lose flakes that cannot be replaced. Original tears, burns and cracks are the work and are constantly misreported as damage, which cuts both ways. The Fondazione Palazzo Albizzini at Citta di Castello holds the archive and issues the archiviazione that the market treats as the reference. Editions and multiples exist and are separate.
At a glance
- Born
- 12 March 1915, Città di Castello
- Died
- 13 February 1995, Nice
- Movements
- Fluxus, Nouveau Réalisme, Arte Povera
More on Wikipedia.
Rome, the Guggenheim and the Grande Cretto
Burri's first solo exhibition, of figurative work, was at La Margherita in Rome in 1947, and by the end of that year he had turned to abstraction; he later treated Nero 1, of 1948, as the starting point of his work. James Johnson Sweeney, director of the Guggenheim, saw his paintings at the Obelisco gallery in Rome in 1953 and introduced them to the United States, and from 1963 Burri spent his winters in Los Angeles.
The Cretti began in 1973, prompted by the cracked ground of Death Valley. The largest is the Grande Cretto at Gibellina in Sicily, which covers the ruins of the town destroyed by the 1968 earthquake in white concrete. The Guggenheim in New York gave him a retrospective in 2015, and the foundation shows his work at Città di Castello in the Palazzo Albizzini and the former tobacco-drying sheds outside the town.
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