The Art Museum of the City of Ravenna presents BURRIRAVENNAORO, an exhibition by Alberto Burri in collaboration with the Fondazione Palazzo Albizzini Burri Collection. The exhibition will be held from 14 October 2023 to 14 January 2024 and will be part of the VIII Biennial of Contemporary Mosaic.
The MAR – Art Museum of the City of Ravenna in collaboration with the Palazzo Albizzini Burri Collection Foundation from 14 October 2023 to 14 January 2024, as part of the VIII Biennial of Contemporary Mosaic, presents BURRIRAVENNAORO, the important exhibition by the Master of Città di Castello, curated by Bruno Corà, in the city where Burri, in the XNUMXs, had launched an intense pictorial action with various cycles of works inspired by the history and artistic culture of Ravenna. The exhibition is made possible thanks to the precious support of the Project of the Ministry of Tourism for the enhancement of Ravenna Città del Mosaico, of the Emilia-Romagna Region, of the Gardini Foundation, of the Monte di Bologna and Ravenna Foundation and of Romagna Acque Società delle fonti.
Alberto Burri (1915-1995) born in Umbria in Città di Castello, after graduating in medicine, obtained in Perugia in 1940, following the war events, taken prisoner in Africa by British troops and handed over to the US allies, he spent three years in a prison camp in Texas, during which he decides to abandon the medical profession and to devote himself entirely to painting. Returning to Italy after the war, in 1946, after a short stay in his hometown, he went to Rome where he began his professional apprenticeship in painting.
Since 1946 in the capital, he made his debut with a figurative painting of which the poets Leonardo Sinisgalli and Libero De Libero are the critical guarantors who present him in the La Margherita gallery, a Roman branch involved in that climate of stimulating artistic proposals in the aftermath of the second conflict world.
After a trip to Paris in 1948, Burri developed his own language, paying particular interest to materials considered extra-pictorial such as tar, pumice stone, glues and others.
The introduction of these materials in his painting allows the artist a radical linguistic zeroing and
an extraordinary operational freedom, prompting him to conceive a different dimension of color, recovered in the chromatic values already existing in the reality of those materials; the black of the tar, the gray of the pumice stone, the ocher of the glues and of the first fabrics such as jute and recycled sacks, mended and worn by an 'experience' which, in the creation of the painting, exponentially increases its significance and the real physical 'presence'. Soon Burri's painting conquered the national and international artistic scene for the strong evocative and dramatic charge of his pictorial language, designating him as the "artist of matter".
Thus, after the Catrami (1948-49), the Sacchi (1949-50), the Gobbi (1950), the Combustioni di carte (1953), but also di legni e Plastiche (1957), the Ferri (1958), the Woods (1958), the Combustion of transparent plastics (1962), the acrovinyl Cretti (1973) and the Cellotex (1952-53), wooden composites painted in acrylic (from 1973 to 1993).
In the 1993s in Ravenna Burri began a collaboration with the Ferruzzi Group which led him to the creation of some significant pictorial cycles which he elaborated and named in different ways and in close relationship with the artistic history of the city. With the S. Vitale cycle he creates large cellotex paintings in black acrylic. Alongside that series of great works he produces graphic works of equal intensity and chromatic strength. The non-fulfilment of the Gardini patronage did not prevent him from developing a passion for a painting reminiscent of the great pictorial season of Byzantine art, abundantly present in the city, in the churches and in the historic buildings decorated with mosaics. The cycles of paintings Black and Gold (XNUMX) were born, inspired by the mosaic culture of high decoration that flourished in Byzantium and developed in the city of Ravenna with numerous admirable masterpieces of Byzantine-Ravenna art.
All these significant works, together with a few selected series of graphic creations, will figure in the rooms of the two floors of the MAR in a whole never before so conspicuously exhibited. Among the approximately one hundred works on display there will also be examples that have earned Burri the National Lincei Prize for graphic work (1973). In this sense, the two areas of his painting and chalcographic production, integrated in the presence of the large red sculpture, Grande Ferro R (1990), at the Palazzo delle Arti e dello sport "Mauro De André" offer a very strong presence of the master from Ticino in the city of Ravenna much loved by him.
A multimedia area relating to Burri's biography, the projects and sketches conceived for the Gardini client and some videos documenting the artist at work, together with the exhibition catalog with critical essays by Bruno Corà, Francesco Moschini, Roberto Cantagalli and Daniele Torcellini and documents of the works exhibited at the MAR, are offered for the occasion as tools for information and study of Burri's entire oeuvre, allowing for a wider knowledge of one of the greatest European artists of the second half of the XNUMXth century.
The exhibition will be open to the public from 14 October 2023 to 14 January 2024.
cm. 25,5×36, Oil, gold leaf, Indian ink, fabric, vinavil on canvas, Città di Castello, Fondazione Palazzo Albizzini Burri Collection – by SIAE 2023
Exhibition: BURRIRAVENNAORO
Location: MAR – Art Museum of the city of Ravenna
Organizing bodies: Municipality of Ravenna – Department of Culture, MAR – Art Museum of the city of Ravenna, Palazzo Albizzini Foundation, Burri Collection
Edited by: Bruno Corà
Period: 14 October 2023 - 14 January 2024
Opening: 13 October 2023, 18.00 pm