Alberto Burri

Collection of Enrico Donati, New York (gift of the artist)
Private Collection, United Kingdom
Acquired from the above by the present owner

This work is in very good condition overall. There is minor evidence of handling along the edges of the canvas, including a minor indentation to the lower right corner, and some paint loss to the black artist’s chosen frame. A light surface soiling is visible. Under extremely close inspection, there are a few minor and unobtrusive pinpoint brown spot accretions visible in the white-painted area and there is a minor separation in the cardboard along the left edge that may be inherent to the medium and the artist’s working method. Under Ultraviolet light inspection, pinpoint drip accretions fluoresce lightly but do not appear to be the result of restoration, and a small area in the white-painted area fluoresces and may be the result of light retouching. Framed in artist’s chosen frame.
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The present work was originally a gift from Alberto Burri to his dear friend, the Surrealist artist Enrico Donati and is dedicated to him on the reverse of the panel. These intimately scaled fully conceptualized and realized works were often based on larger-scale versions, and Burri frequently sent these miniatures to friends as gifts. In his review of Alberto Burri: The Trauma of Painting at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in 2015, Blake Gopnik raved about these scaled-down masterpieces, proclaiming: “Not only are the miniatures my favorite thing in the entire show, but they transform how we need to read their larger avatars. The very fact that there can be avatars of a Burri automatically pulls it out of the world of the expressive, singular moment of making, which is the Jackson Pollock-ish world evoked by the distressed surfaces and angstful affect of most Burri works. Instead, we enter Marcel Duchamp territory, where works exist as free-floating ideas that can be conjured up in any number of ways, at any number of scales—I’m thinking, of course, of the various versions of Duchamp’s Boîte-en-valise, the suitcase in which he presented tiny reproductions of all of his works. As autonomous objects, meant to be contemplated for their emotions and aesthetics, Burri’s objects can feel oversimple and overblown. Considered instead as mere ideas for possible pictures they become more interesting, less full of themselves. They become the lab notes for experiments that Burri has run, and we can understand the experiment equally well whether the notes are in a tiny Moleskin or copied out big on a blackboard; we barely need to think at all about the particular mess left behind on the lab bench” (Blake Gopnik, “At the Guggenheim, Alberto Burri Goes All Duchamp,” Artnet News, 10 December 2015).

This work is registered in the Fondazione Burri, Città di Castello under number 5568 and is accompanied by a certificate.