Exhibition, 23 Sep 2016 - 6 Jan 2017

Alberto Burri: lo Spazio di Materia – tra Europa e U.S.A

Fondazione Palazzo Albizzini Collezione Burri, Città di Castello, Italy

After the notable sucess of the Alberto Burri: The Trauma of Painting exhibition at the Guggenheim Museum in New York, in October 2015, and the subsequent exhibition at the Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen in Düsseldorf, the celebrations of the centenary of the birth of the great Italian artist conclude with an extraordinary new exhibition event in Città di Castello, his birth place, organised by the Foundation. A large review of the most significant 20th-century post-war contemporary art trends with possible thematic links to Burri’s art, whether antecedent, contemporaneous or subsequent to it, with focus on dialectic aspects of most evident influence, will be held in the former Tabacco Kilns from 24 September 2016 until 6 January 2017 under the title Burri Lo Spazio di Materia / Tra Europa e USA (Burri The Space of Matter / Between Europe and the USA). As stated by Richard Armstrong, Director of the Guggenheim Museum, on the occasion of the opening of the retrospective Alberto Burri: The Trauma of Painting, “the exhibition affirms Burri’s position as one of the most innovative artists of the post-war period. Burri (…) created a new type of object, simultaneously pictorial and sculptural, which subsequently influenced artists associated with Neo-Dada, Noveau Réalisme and Post Minimalism...”, as well as Italian Arte Povera. To these considerations, others may be added that are no less relevant in terms of the linguistic imagination that flowed from his work. Burri was an artist who derived an unprecedented spatiality from his direct and almost exclusive use of material, characterised by “control of the unexpected” and a masterful balance that distinguished its forms. This large exhibition review, in which hundreds of paintings, sculptures and installations are brought together, will facilitate observations and reflections that highlight the centrality of Burri’s painting in the international art scene since the late 1940s. After his imprisonment in the USA, during his journey of initiation to Paris in 1948-1949, he gained first-hand knowledge of the painting of Mirò, Fautrier, Dubuffet and other exponents of European art who were active there, with fertile consequences for the development of his own material-based pictorial language; his subsequent travels to the USA over the course of the 1950s brought him into contact with the painting of Pollock, Motherwell, De Kooning and other abstract expressionists, with its own diversity and originality.