Alberto Burri

 Alberto Burri (12 March 1915 – 13 February 1995) was an Italian painter and sculptor considered a key figure in Post-War art and such artistic movements as Neo-Dada, Nouveau réalisme, postminimalism and Arte PoveraIn one of his very rare statements, Burri claimed that the critics’ words, as well as his own, were of no use in offering a description of his artworks, affirming that its only real key strength was the formal balance that poor and industrial materials were surprisingly able to give

"Alberto Burri was an Italian artist and one of the most prominent abstract painters of the 20th century. Associated with the Arte Povera movement, he is perhaps best known for his sacchi (“sacks”) series, wherein he stitched, patched, and painted on rough burlap bags. “The words don’t mean anything to me; they talk around the picture. What I have to express appears in the picture,” he once remarked. “With the other elements it is involved in a whole chain of pulls and tensions. But this is only the architectonic structure. For the rest I have nothing to add.” Born on March 12, 1915 in Citta di Castello, Italy, he studied medicine before serving in Mussolini’s army during World War II as a doctor. Captured in Tunisia, Burri was interned at Camp Howze in Texas as a prisoner of war, where he began painting on readily available discarded burlap. After his release in 1946, he moved to Rome where his art practice turned towards abstraction. His interest in non-traditional materials continued with experiments using wood, tar, plastic, zinc oxide, pumice, PVC adhesives, and fabric. In 1960, his solo show at the Venice Biennale garnered him the Critics Prize, and in 1963, he had his first US retrospective at the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston. He died on February 15, 1995 in Nice, France, and was the subject of a major posthumous museum retrospective in 2015 when the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York presented “Alberto Burri: The Trauma of Painting.” Today, the artist’s works are held in the collections of the Tate Gallery in London, the Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea in Rome, and The Museum of Modern Art in New York, among others."(artnet.com)

Alberto Burri

Alberto Burri,  (born March 12, 1915, Città di Castello, Italy—died Feb. 13, 1995, Nice, France), Italian artist known for his adventurous use of new materials.
Burri was trained as a physician and began to paint only in 1944, while in a prisoner-of-war camp in Texas. About 1946 he moved to Rome and began to paint seriously. His early works—rags splashed in red paint to simulate blood-soaked bandages—grew directly out of his experiences as a doctor in the Italian army. He then began to produce works grouped into series according to the material used. The works of the earliest series (c. 1953) were made of coarse cloth stitched together. After 1956 he employed thin pieces of burned wood and layers of polyethylene in which holes were burned, creating a rich spatial network within the layers of plastic. The humble and sometimes crude materials used in these works contrast effectively with their elegant designs, and the easily destroyed materials form a perforated network over an impinging background field. In his series of metal works done after 1959, however, the solid material completely encloses the background field, although the metal is hammered from behind as if the imprisoned field were trying to break out.( Britannica)