Alberto Burri: The Trauma of Painting - Hardcover

Emily Braun; Megan M. Fontanella

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0892075236 ISBN 13: 9780892075232

Publisher: Guggenheim Museum Publications, 2015

Synopsis

Published to accompany a major retrospective exhibition – the first in the United States in more than 35 years and the most comprehensive ever mounted – this title showcases the pioneering work of Italian artist Alberto Burri (1915–1995). Exploring the beauty and complexity of Burri’s process-based works, the exhibition positions the artist as a central and singular protagonist of postwar art. Burri is best known for his series of Sacchi (sacks) made of stitched and patched remnants of torn burlap bags, often combined with fragments of discarded clothing. Far less familiar are his other series, which this exhibition represents in depth: Catrami (tars), Gobbi (hunchbacks), Muffe (molds), Bianchi (whites), Legni (woods), Ferri (irons), Combustioni plastiche (plastic combustions), Cretti and Cellotex works. Burri’s work both demolished and reconfigured the Western pictorial tradition, while reconceptualizing modernist collage. Using unconventional materials, he moved beyond the painted surfaces and mark making of American Abstract Expressionism and European Art Informel. Burri’s unprecedented approaches to manipulating humble substances – and his abject picture-objects – also profoundly influenced Arte Povera, Neo-Dada and Process art.

About this title

Review:

...the catalogue accompanying the exhibition is a lodestone of information about Burri. Not only has Emily Braun, who supervised this exhibition, unearthed a wealth of information, but she has also written a substantial essay, "The Trauma of Painting," that is wonderfully absent of academic jargon and hyperbole, making it a pleasure to read.--John Yau "Hyperallergic "

In a dazzlingly researched, often eloquent catalog essay, Emily Braun, an art historian who oversaw the Guggenheim show, "Alberto Burri: The Trauma of Painting" (and is also curator of the Leonard A. Lauder Collection of Cubist Art), argues that Burri's art is a crucial, underacknowledged link in the development of collage and assemblage and helped set the stage for a host of postwar art movements--Neo-Dada, Process Art, Arte Povera and more.--Roberta Smith "The New York Times "

About this edition

• Publisher: Guggenheim Museum Publications
• Publication date: 2015
• ISBN 10: 0892075236
• ISBN 13: 9780892075232
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 280