Alberto Burri

Galleria Blu, Milano
Acquired directly from the above by the previous owner

Cesare Brandi & Vittorio Rubiu, Burri: Contributo al Catalogo Generale, Rome 1963, p. 203, no. 183, illustrated
Fondazione Palazzo Albizzini, Eds., Burri Contributi al Catalogo Sistematico, Città di Castello 1990, p. 435, no. 1872, illustrated

Colour: The colours in the catalogue illustration are fairly accurate, although the overall tonality is richer and warmer, with the burlap tending more towards ochre in the original. The catalogue illustration fails to fully convey the rich surface texture, as well as to show the artist's frame present in the original. Condition: This work is in very good condition. No restoration is apparent when examined under ultra-violet light.
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Nero F is a work created at the height of Alberto Burri's most exciting and challenging period: it is an invitation into a matrix of historical references through a sensual mixture of tones and textures. It exemplifies Burri's reassessment of the traditional rules of painting, in a dynamic practice that saw him bring to the canvas materials as diverse as pumice and paper, and a three-dimensional understanding of the picture plane that was, above all, invigorating. For this reason, by the 1960s, Burri was considered, along with Lucio Fontana, to be an influence of immeasurable importance on the emerging generation of younger artists that would coalesce under Pierre Restany's flag of Nouveau Réalisme.

 

Burri made an attack on what he regarded as an inoffensive, decorative and tasteful trend in abstraction by rooting his abstract pieces, of which Nero F is a prime example, in everyday and earthy materials. Burri revels in the unfixed and changing state of the physical world, allowing unorthodox materials to grow and take shape on the canvas as if inbued with a life of their own. Here we see from a deliciously swampish ooze of black tar, there emerges the ghost of an 'F' - indication of what Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev identifies as Burri's great influence on the development of sign painting (Exhibition Catalogue, London, Tate Modern; Minneapolis, Walker Art Centre, Zero to Infinity: Arte Povera 1962-1972, 2001, p. 29).

 

Nero F is a collision of genres: the ruched sacking, bulging away from the wall and painted with tar, pushes beyond the traditional categorisation of artwork: painting meets sculpture meets collage, in what is a daring yet tactile creation, with formidable presence. Sensitive to the interplay of textures, the contrast between crusty folds of sacking and the dense matt black, invites us to touch but at the same time adds a cringe-inducing frisson.

Nero F is a powerful example of Burri's instinct that found materials - the reconstituted vestiges of everyday activity - imbue the work with an intensely human and keenly physical dimension. Burri yokes together the humble immediacy of daily life with weighty historical references via his selection of materials, here sacking and tar, but elsewhere mixed media works include old clothes, bits of plastic, glimpses of graphics, tin cans, tar, coal, wrappings, household goods and tools.

 

Burri was insistent on making the connection between art and life, and so his use of found materials in the mid-1950s serves to place the work firmly in its social context: they are the stuff of a profoundly altered society. The artwork sizzles with an almost moral alertness to the responsibilities of living in a post-war world, specifically Italy, at a time of political fracture and internal migration on an unprecedented scale and when the boom in textile, steel and car industries was still shadowed by the near and urgent threat of poverty. Emilio Villa lauded these 'qualities of ordinary working-class materials defended with love, ennobled and made up as if in preparation for some superior book of etiquette' in an essay for the catalogue of Burri's first solo show at the Fondazione Origine in 1953. They were able, Villa argues, to 'win a sense of solemn worth, a sense of fulfillment, an illumination, one of the most concrete and supreme allegories we can know today.' (Alberto Burri, Fondazione Origine, Rome, 1953, illustrated in Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, ed., Arte Povera, London, 1999, p. 207).

 

A shared preoccupation with the ambiguity of the pictorial surface and with non-art materials had led Burri to help start the Gruppo Origine in 1950, whose focal point was an adventurous artist-run space, the Fondazione Origine. Although a beacon in Italy, Burri's work summons up cross-Atlantic parallels, most notably the Combine paintings and assemblages of Robert Rauschenberg, who visited Burri's studio in 1953. Ultimately therefore Nero F is a work that straddles both local and far reaching concerns: while it stands as an evocative and touching reflection on post-war life in Italy, it is also engaged in a dialogue about the confluence of popular and high culture that is prescient of Pop Art in the decade ahead. Packed with sensual and allusive folds, Nero F is a complicated and rewarding visual experience.