Alberto Burri

Alberto Burri
Bianco Plastica, 1966, plastic, acrylic, combustion on Celotex, 100x75cm, Museo d'Arte Contemporanea Donna Regina
Born	(1915-03-12)12 March 1915 Città di Castello, Italy
Died	15 February 1995(1995-02-15) (aged 79) Nice, France
Nationality	Italian
Known for	Painting, Sculpture
Awards	Italian Order of Merit in 1994

Alberto Burri (born 12 March 1915 – 13 February 1995) was an Italian painter and sculptor.

Alberto Burri was born in Città di Castello, in Umbria in 1915 to a wine merchant and an elementary school teacher. He earned a medical degree from the University of Perugia specializing in tropical medicine. On 12 October 1940, two days after Italy entered World War II, Burri was called up as a medic and sent to Libya. On 8 May 1943 after the Axis forces were defeated at El Alamein, his unit was captured in Tunisia. He was interned at a war camp in Hereford, Texas, where he spent the next two years and began to paint.

World War II had wreaked havoc on Italy. The country's resources had bled dry, defeat had made it old and bitter and years of fascism had imposed an agonizing cultural narrow-mindedness. A sort of modern Renaissance however swept through the country with the end of the Second World War. Artists began to use their work as a way to reexamine the past and the future of a country trying to find confidence in itself. Painters, poets and intellectuals formed new groups, cultural associations and drafted specialized periodicals and invited new theories, paving the way for a brand new platform for art.

The 1950s were also a time when much cultural exchange was encouraged between Italy and the United States. Many American artists like Kooning, Matta, Rauschenberg, Rothko and Twombly visited and lived in Rome for brief intervals of time. Rome also emerged as a favorite venue for meetings amongst critics like Herbert Read, Willem Sandberg, James Johnson Sweeney, second director of the Guggenheim Museum, and Michel Tapié. It was during this time that the works of Afro Basaldella, Burri and Lucio Fontana emerged as pioneers of post-war Italian art. While Burri experimented with the material wounds inflicted by war through his symbolic pieces of art, Afro entered a neo-cubist phase and Fontana experimented with the traditional idea of space.