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Lot Essay
One of the first of Burri's plastiche - the series of pulled, stretched, twisted, punctured and melted transparent plastic paintings that Burri began in 1962 and which preoccupied him throughout much of the 1960s - Plastica is a unique and powerfully expressive physical articulation of material nothingness.
Following on from his series of Legni and Ferri in which Burri had burnt into his materials, (wood and iron), in order to reveal and expose the inherent and existential nature of their physical properties and their material essence, Burri again turned to fire and combustion applying it, with dramatic results, to the more fragile and contemporary material of plastic. It was perhaps the later rather baroque stretches and punctures of his red plastiche- produced following his operation in the mid-sixties - that best expressed the heavy material nature of plastic, but it is in his great early transparent plastiche that the full complexity and ethereal nature of this modern material is best articulated.
The first plastiche were exhibited in 1962 at the Galleria Marlborough in Rome and culminated in the enormous Grande plastica also of 1962 in which Burri transformed this strange bubbling transparent medium into an environment. As in this epic work, in these early transparent plastiche and in a move that echoed the spatial constructions of Lucio Fontana, Burri stretched sheets of transparent plastic over an open support so that the seemingly open and translucent nature of the material came to the fore. Stretched and twisted, and pulled into a fluid and seemingly flowing unity of form that informs the space around it, Burri melted and punctured the transparent material creating a flowing series of folds, creases and gaping holes. These open gaping wounds of emptiness - expressed by a material that was itself transparent - sent many of the critics of the period into raptures for they saw in them an ultimately contemporary expression of the great void that had driven so much of the monochrome and informel art in the previous decade. In fact, as in all of Burri's work these holes and punctures were the logical consequence, applied to a radically new material, of Burri's attempt to 'draw out' of the material its own innate nature and property.
Following on from his series of Legni and Ferri in which Burri had burnt into his materials, (wood and iron), in order to reveal and expose the inherent and existential nature of their physical properties and their material essence, Burri again turned to fire and combustion applying it, with dramatic results, to the more fragile and contemporary material of plastic. It was perhaps the later rather baroque stretches and punctures of his red plastiche- produced following his operation in the mid-sixties - that best expressed the heavy material nature of plastic, but it is in his great early transparent plastiche that the full complexity and ethereal nature of this modern material is best articulated.
The first plastiche were exhibited in 1962 at the Galleria Marlborough in Rome and culminated in the enormous Grande plastica also of 1962 in which Burri transformed this strange bubbling transparent medium into an environment. As in this epic work, in these early transparent plastiche and in a move that echoed the spatial constructions of Lucio Fontana, Burri stretched sheets of transparent plastic over an open support so that the seemingly open and translucent nature of the material came to the fore. Stretched and twisted, and pulled into a fluid and seemingly flowing unity of form that informs the space around it, Burri melted and punctured the transparent material creating a flowing series of folds, creases and gaping holes. These open gaping wounds of emptiness - expressed by a material that was itself transparent - sent many of the critics of the period into raptures for they saw in them an ultimately contemporary expression of the great void that had driven so much of the monochrome and informel art in the previous decade. In fact, as in all of Burri's work these holes and punctures were the logical consequence, applied to a radically new material, of Burri's attempt to 'draw out' of the material its own innate nature and property.