Private Collection , Milan
Galleria Tega, Art Basel
Acquired directly from the above by the present owner in 2006

Fondazione Palazzo Albizzini, Eds., Burri. Contributi al Catalogo Sistematico, Città di Castello 1990, p. 43, no. 137, illustrated in colour

Colour: The colours in the catalogue illustration are fairly accurate, although the overall tonality is slightly lighter in the original. Condition: This work is in very good condition. Close inspection reveals two small networks of a few very short and stable hairline cracks in the bottom right quadrant. No restoration is apparent under ultraviolet light.
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"Words are no help to me when I try to speak about my painting. It is an irreducible presence which refuses to be transferred into any other form of expression. It is a presence both imminent and active."
The artist cited in: Exhibition Catalogue, New York, Museum of Modern Art, The New Decade, 1955)

The art of Alberto Burri offers a parallel vision of reality: one defined by the intrinsic qualities of materials. Composizione executed in 1952 is testament to the very inauguration of Burri's pursuit of matter as the subject of painting. Exhibiting an organic coalition of fabric, oil paint, resin mediated and variegated with the archetypal viscerality of Burri's dialect. At a time when most artists were still preoccupied with Abstract Expressionism and lyrical Abstraction to express the emotional flux of passing experience, Burri immersed his art in the realm of the real, employing found 'low-art' materials of everyday existence to achieve a more direct exchange between art and life. Built around dynamic relationships of the contrasting textures and colours, this groundbreaking artistic direction was first initiated with the pioneering corpus of Composizioni to which the present work belongs.

On a trip to Paris in 1948, Burri encountered the work of Jean Dubuffet and Jean Fautrier; in these artists Burri found inspiration in the primitive rawness of their work. However, in contrast to his French contemporaries who looked to uphold the traditional distinction between figure and ground by inscribing figures into the surfaces of their heavily textured compositions, Burri abandoned pictorial mimesis altogether. By negating and relinquishing the traditional relationship between figure and ground, Burri pioneered an inimitably new pictorial dialogue of pure abstraction grounded in the visual impact and coalescence of materials and their physical properties. The precise structure of its composition and the tension of the constructive-destructive gesture exploit the expressive possibilities of the raw, worn jute, seeping resin and blotches of scraped and deposited paint to engender a perfect equilibrium between the sensuality of the texture, the balance of the composition and the vitality of the materials. Evidencing an animatedly organic polymaterialism, the present work epitomises Burri's revoluti𝕴onary approach to material and his transformation of the concept of painting.

The Composizioni were the first series in which Burri powerfully wielded the chaotic and formless nature of materials. Initiated during the last years of the 1940s and thus contextualised within a socio-political climate entrenched in recovery after World War II, Burri's works were often attributed as metaphorical for the destruction wrought by modern warfare. Moreover, immediately after the war Burri turned away from his formative training and occupation as a medic to pursue an artistic career. Though refuted by the artist, the parallel between the impulsion to forge new expression for the rawness of existence and living matter after such a severe historical trauma, resonates within the organic and lyrically amoebic surfaces of Burri's work. Redolent within the overlapping of fabric, dry cracking and fractured ochre punctuated with viscous and textural paroxysms of  red and black paint, this work pre-figures the corpus of stitched and sutchered Sacchi and the later series of poetically scorched and burnt wood, iron and plastic canvases. Heralding the very realisation of artistic maturity during the incipient years of the 1950s, the folds and layers of lacerated surface, bare fabric and oozing resin Burri posits an aesthetic power that s🧸peaks of an elemental life force beyond representation. Echoing growth, decay, corrosion, these works br♏eathe organic vitality in the relationship between amalgamated materials.

Burri's art is rooted in the conviction that feeling can be expressed yet not described: "The words don't mean anything to me; they talk around the picture. What I have to express appears in the picture" (the artist in: Milton Gendel, 'Burri Makes a Picture', in: Art News, 1954). Existing outside of language and suggesting the atavistic, Burri's Composizione authoritatively expresses the tumult of elementary relationships between materiality and gesture. Translating into art the chaotic flux and indescribable energies of contemporary existence into the language of art, Burri's remarkably influential oeuvre precipitated a direct visual dialectic between the pre-lingual and non-formal, destruction and creation. His works capture that which is inexpressable, by-passing the symbolic and articulating without recourse to the referential or mimetic to forge an entirely elemental yet masterfully artistic, perceptual, sensorial and material interaction as living substance. Indeed, utterly beyond words yet perhaps best expressed in the artist's own: "It is an irreducible presence which refuses to be transferred into any other form of expression. It is a presence both imminent and active" (the artist in: Exhibition Catalogue, New York, Museum of Modern Art, The New Decade, 1955). Like raw geological samples extracted straight from the earth, the organic aesthetic and principles of Burri's praxis established the early foundations of Arte Povera; actively inspiring a whole generation of artists in their creative endeavours through his alchemical facility꧃ with materials.