Burris‘s early material pictures – the destruction of the traditional pictorial concept
Alberto Burri‘s early material pictures are among the most critical positions in European post-war art. As early as the 1950s, these revolutionary creations in wood, metal, or plastic, which challenged the traditional pictorial concept, were recognized beyond Burri‘s home country, Italy, in the first museum exhibitions in the USA. In 1958, the year the present work was created, the San Francisco Museum of Art dedicated
the first US museum solo exhibition to the artist. Other major museums followed suit, paying tribute to this exceptional Italian artist‘s progressive work, regarded as one of the most pioneering figures of European Post-War Modernism. Finally, “Alberto Burri: The Trauma of Painting” is the telling title of the significant Burri retrospective at the Guggenheim Museum in New York in 2015/16, which, in a few words, aptly describes the essence of Burri‘s work: The courageous break with traditions and the forceful destruction of the traditional pictorial concept through the use of materials that had previously been non-art materi-
als, such as wood, gunny, metal, and plastic. Burri does not paint; he nails, glues, sews, welds, solders, and staples the most diverse materials onto the canvas and soon begins to integrate the element of fire.




Burri‘s “Legni” – Aesthetic innovations on the basis of non-art materials
Burri was a doctor by profession before he served as a soldier at the front and then as a field medic in World War II. After his battalion was imprisoned in Tunisia in May 1943, Burri was taken to a POW camp in Texas, where he started to work as an artist for the first time. When Burri returned to Italy in 1946, he set up a studio in Rome and began his pioneering artistic work as an autodidact. In 1947, he traveled to Paris and encountered the early works of Jean Dubuffet, who experimented with tar, which would have a lasting impact on his creation. Henceforth, Burri used the image carrier as the basis for his massive material images and assemblages.




In addition to the “Legni,” which includes our fascinating work, he made the famous early series “Sacchi,” patches of jute sacks and fragments of discarded clothing stitched together, as well as the soldered metal objects “Ferri.” Many of these aesthetic innovations are based on Burri‘s visual experiences as a soldier in the Second World War, which he processed artistically in his unusual aesthetic creations.







Burris Œuvre – a bold new artistic beginning
Burri's work represents a decisive artistic restart after the Second World War, a courageous œuvre that provided a clear counterpoint to the gestural trends of the time, be it European Informalism or American Action Painting. Burri almost entirely refuses to use color in his artworks and rigorously rejects any painterly style as a gestural signature. With all its disturbing consistency, everything that characterized this bold new beginning in Burri's art of the 1950s finds paradigmatic expression in the present work "Legno P1". From the legendary Galleria Blu in Milan, which also represented Lucio Fontana at this time, "Legno P1" was sold through the Cologne gallery Aenne Abels to the collection of the Rhineland businessman Klaus Gebhard before it was eventually sold to an outstanding German private collection of international post-war modernism at auction in London in 1993. [JS]