Alberto Burri

Luxembourg & Dayan, New York

Acquired from the above by the present owner in 2013

Milan, La Triennale di Milano, Alberto Burri, November 2008 – February 2009, p. 131, no. 58, fig. 229, illustrated

New York, Luxembourg & Dayan, Alberto Burri: Black Cellotex, March – April 2013, p. 35, illustrated in colour

Fondazione Palazzo Albizzini, Alberto Burri, General Catalogue, Painting 1979-1994, Vol. III, Città di Castello 2015, p. 246, no. 2052, illustrated in colour; and Vol. VI, p. 282, no. i 86876, illustrated in colour

Colour: The colour in the catalogue illustration is fairly accurate. Condition: This work is in very good condition. No restoration is apparent when examined under ultra-violet light.
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Striking in both its monumental scale and compositional and monochromatic simplicity, Nero Cellotex encapsulates two of Burri’s defining traits: the artist’s assessment of the limitless potential of materiality as a vehicle for artistic expression and his subversive exploration of monochrome painting. Executed in 1986-87, Nero Cellotex is a rare late work from a series of Black Cellotex paintings the artist created between 1986 and 1987, which continue his radical appointment of matter as the subject of his painting. Notably these works were recently exhibited in the show Alberto Burri: Black Cellotex at Luxembourg & Dayan in New York in 2013.

Having previously used cellotex as a supporting ground in his acclaimed Legni, Plastiche and Cretti the raw board of cellotex becomes the primary focus of this late body of work. Using knives to cut, pull and sculpt the surface, he creates a lyrical band of textured black-on-black curvilinear shapes with just a single medium. Identifiable by their austere blackness, this mature cycle of work is prized not only for its severe minimalism but also for its rough tactile beauty and coarse conceptual impetus.

Having pioneered an artistic inquiry in celebration of the unglamorous substances of modern living, Burri was an extremely influential figure in the ensuing Arte Povera movement in Italy during the late 1960s. With their privileging of everyday materials, these artists sought to buck convention and ‘break down the dichotomy between art and life’ – a driving force prophetically central within Burri’s early 1950s production. Nonetheless where these divergent artists would privilege political motives or Pop Art strategies, Burri was concerned with the material reality of the picture plane. By transforming cuts of industrial iron, sheets of plastic and boards of cellotex, Burri looked to regenerate and substantiate an expression of the real beyond mimesis. He employed an agenda of minimal artistic intervention as a means of exposing the primary naturalness of materiality. This reductive autonomy stands in correlation to the contemporaneous work of Lucio Fontana, whilst inspiring and pre-figuring Piero Manzoni and Enrico Castellani in their quest for a dematerialization of the artwork as substantive of the real.

Burri had spent most of the Second World War in America, having been captured and imprisoned by Allied troops. Thus it wasn’t until he returned to Naples in 1946 that he witnessed the aftermath of the conflict upon Italy. He saw gutted apartment blocks, charred black with smoke, and Renaissance churches, stripped of their facades and reduced to rubble. Burri’s brother had been killed, thousands of others were homeless or starving, and it seemed that everything he had previously held dear had been destroyed. He was a surgeon before the war, and a military doctor before he was captured, but to pick up where he left off as if nothing had changed seemed barbaric and reprehensible, even sacrilegious. He turned instead to art; what had started as a prison hobby now became a calling, even an obsession. For the rest of his life, Burri immersed himself completely in the creation of extraordinarily powerful abstract paintings. They were the only means by which he was able to comprehend the horrific trauma that had been inflicted upon his life, his family, and the society in which he lived.

Reaching a perfect equilibrium between a minimal composition and the sensuality of texture, the present work epitomises Burri's reassessment of the traditional rules of painting.  A climactic paradigm of his revolutionary celebration of materiality, Nero Cellotex stands as a work of pivotal importance within the highly acclaimed oeuvre of Alberto Burri.