Alberto Burri at the Peggy Guggenheim Collection
May 10 - June 24, 2002
From Friday May 10 until June 24, 2002, within the second (until June 3rd) and third (June 7th to August 4th) phases of the exhbition; “Themes and Variations. Post-War Art from the Peggy Guggenheim Collection,” curated by Luca Massimo Barbero, two rooms will be dedicated to a series of works in plastic by Alberto Burri (Città di Castello 1915 – Nizza 1995). This installation, organized in collaboration with the Fondazione Palazzo Albizzini “Collezione Burri”, Città di Castello, is made possible thanks to the support of Maurice Kanbar and Isabella del Frate Rayburn Eich.
The six pieces exhibited in the two rooms dedicated to Burri, dating from the early sixties, are considered to be the most innovative and influential of his artistic career and are characterized by their strong materiality and depth of color. Among the exhibited works are Combusione (1963) and the small Rosso Plastica (1965) both only exhibited once in the past. By presenting Burri’s large scale works, the dynamic character of “Themes and Variations” is emphasized and offers both surprising and challenging ideas by Curator Luca Massimo Barbero.
From the start of his career, Burri expressed a strong gestural quality, letting matter transform itself by aleatory processes, similar to the style of the American Abstract Expressionists. After having worked with tar, molds and other expressive non-traditional mediums, Burri began to burn materials in the mid 1950s, manipulating and transforming them with a flame torch, creating a technique that he would later call combustione. He first practiced this technique using wood and then (at the beginning of the 1960s) on plastic, a material that melts in strange and capricious forms, sometimes evoking human skin and tissue. The plastic works, exhibited for the first time at the Malborough Gallery in Rome, in 1962, caused a big scandal, affirming Burri’s place as one of the most important visionaries of contemporary art.
In 1953, Burri took part in the group exhibition “Younger European Painters” at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York. James Johnson Sweeney, at the time director of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum of New York, clearly states his opinion of Burri’s work in an essay he wrote in 1963: “Burri’s work is an eloquent example of making instead of copying. Due to the emphasis that he gives to his materials, he is able to suggest new forms, effects and bring out sensuality in raw matter, from colour to light.”
Banca del Gottardo is Institutional Patron of the Peggy Guggenheim Collection
The programs of the Peggy Guggenheim Collection are made possible by the Peggy Guggenheim Collection Advisory Board, Alitalia, Regione Veneto and Intrapresæ Collezione Guggenheim.