Alberto Burri

Red Black

Alberto Burri

Alberto Burri participated in the Second World War as a field doctor and began to take an interest in painting during his imprisonment, before dedicating himself completely to art and becoming one of the most important artists of the 20th century. His works belong to informal art, a movement born at the end of the 1940s that rejected figurative art in favour of a new pictorial language, using new and unprecedented materials such as tars, iron, mould, wood, earth, glue, pumice and enamel.

Alberto Burri

Alberto Burri participated in the Second World War as a field doctor and began to take an interest in painting during his imprisonment, before dedicating himself completely to art and becoming one of the most important artists of the 20th century. His works belong to informal art, a movement born at the end of the 1940s that rejected figurative art in favour of a new pictorial language, using new and unprecedented materials such as tars, iron, mould, wood, earth, glue, pumice and enamel.

Burri's works can be classified into series: the Blacks, the Humps, the Moulds, the Sacks, the Combustions, the Irons and Woods; the artist then moves on to the manipulation of artificial materials such as the Plastics. The materials, the collage, the tears, the seams, the burns are transformed into a violent and intense image orchestrated by the painter. This is followed by the Cretti and Cellotex series.

98,8 x 85,2 cm

Date: 1953
Medium: oil, enamel paint, canvas, pumicite on canvas

Intro

The work Red Black is a canvas made with a mixed technique: oil paint, canvas and pumice sand. The canvas on which the artist worked has already been painted. The pumice stone sands are spread on the surface in an irregular manner, leaving some parts rougher and in relief, others less so.

The work is located at Gallerie d'Italia - Milano.

The work Red Black is a canvas made with a mixed technique: oil paint, canvas and pumice sand. The canvas on which the artist worked has already been painted. The pumice stone sands are spread on the surface in an irregular manner, leaving some parts rougher and in relief, others less so.

The work is located at Gallerie d'Italia - Milano.

The colours that characterise the painting are red and black, which are spread over the material.

The red is distributed irregularly over the surface, leaving the brushstrokes visible, covering part of the canvas at the bottom and a lateral section to the right.

The black blends in as a vertical section on half of the left side.

The centre of the canvas has been left free of paint, allowing the viewer to perceive an irregular, textured surface made possible by the overlapping of the pumice stone dust.

Starting from the left, in the bottom corner one can see two irregularly shaped fragments of fabric glued onto the surface and juxtaposed. The first is a sort of rectangle placed vertically painted white, flanked by a square glued on the surface with no colour, so that the material
itself becomes the colour.