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Lot Essay
This work is recorded in the Archives of the Fondazione Palazzo Albizzini, Collezzione Burri, under number 56.70.
'It is not painting that feigns reality but reality that feigns painting.' (Argan writing on Burri's painting in the introduction to the catalogue for Burri's room at the 1960 Venice Biennale, cited in G. Serafini, Burri, Milan 1999, p. 128).
This large black sackcloth painting entitled Nero (Black) is one of an important series of paintings that Burri produced in the mid-1950s. The first of his paintings to be entitled Nero was made in 1948 predating but anticipating his first truly groundbreaking series of 'paintings', the Sacchi that commenced with the painting SZ1 in 1949. These works, made of the 'poor material' of sackcloth (originating from the USAID food parcels regularly sent from America to Italy in the late 1940s and early '50s) were the first works of the post-war era to assert a material integrity. In the Sacchi and the Neri the traditional material support for a painting, the canvas or cloth, became the work of art. Torn, ripped, sewn burnt stretched and layered in a variety of ways, the material of which the work of art was made, was articulated by Burri, into a material expression of its own intrinsic nature. This action had revolutionary implications for much of the art in Italy that followed it from Fontana's slashed canvases and Manzoni's Achromes to the conscious adoption of the 'poor material' aesthetic by the Minimalist and 'Arte Povera' generation of the 1960s.
In the sackcloth Nero paintings of the mid-1950s Burri appears to invoke an almost mystical essence to his materials by drenching them in a thick black punctuated only here and there with flashes of the sack's original colour and a rich fiery red or an oppositional white. 'What I seek to draw out in them', Burri said of his use of materials, 'is solely their property'. (Alberto Burri cited in G. Serafini, Burri, Milan 1999, p. 181). In this strong example from 1956 Burri has employed a full range of techniques, ripping, tearing and stretching the cloth material in a way that both investigates and asserts its materiality. Using only the inherent elements of which it is made, it is a work that responds the new atomic age of the transmutability and flux of material by asserting the full range of its own material possibility. It was this essential quality of his work that Burri described as being 'an irreduceable presence' that ultimately spoke for itself. 'I have no need for words when I try to express my ideas about painting' he said, 'because my painting is an irreduceable presence which refuses to be converted into any other form of expression.' (Alberto Burri speaking in 1955 cited in Burri, G. Serafini, Milan 1999, p. 114).
'It is not painting that feigns reality but reality that feigns painting.' (Argan writing on Burri's painting in the introduction to the catalogue for Burri's room at the 1960 Venice Biennale, cited in G. Serafini, Burri, Milan 1999, p. 128).
This large black sackcloth painting entitled Nero (Black) is one of an important series of paintings that Burri produced in the mid-1950s. The first of his paintings to be entitled Nero was made in 1948 predating but anticipating his first truly groundbreaking series of 'paintings', the Sacchi that commenced with the painting SZ1 in 1949. These works, made of the 'poor material' of sackcloth (originating from the USAID food parcels regularly sent from America to Italy in the late 1940s and early '50s) were the first works of the post-war era to assert a material integrity. In the Sacchi and the Neri the traditional material support for a painting, the canvas or cloth, became the work of art. Torn, ripped, sewn burnt stretched and layered in a variety of ways, the material of which the work of art was made, was articulated by Burri, into a material expression of its own intrinsic nature. This action had revolutionary implications for much of the art in Italy that followed it from Fontana's slashed canvases and Manzoni's Achromes to the conscious adoption of the 'poor material' aesthetic by the Minimalist and 'Arte Povera' generation of the 1960s.
In the sackcloth Nero paintings of the mid-1950s Burri appears to invoke an almost mystical essence to his materials by drenching them in a thick black punctuated only here and there with flashes of the sack's original colour and a rich fiery red or an oppositional white. 'What I seek to draw out in them', Burri said of his use of materials, 'is solely their property'. (Alberto Burri cited in G. Serafini, Burri, Milan 1999, p. 181). In this strong example from 1956 Burri has employed a full range of techniques, ripping, tearing and stretching the cloth material in a way that both investigates and asserts its materiality. Using only the inherent elements of which it is made, it is a work that responds the new atomic age of the transmutability and flux of material by asserting the full range of its own material possibility. It was this essential quality of his work that Burri described as being 'an irreduceable presence' that ultimately spoke for itself. 'I have no need for words when I try to express my ideas about painting' he said, 'because my painting is an irreduceable presence which refuses to be converted into any other form of expression.' (Alberto Burri speaking in 1955 cited in Burri, G. Serafini, Milan 1999, p. 114).