“Grande legno e rosso is a prime example from one of Burri’s most celebrated periods,” said Hugues Joffre, Phillips’ Senior Advisor to the CEO. “A picture of exceptional quality, the sale of Grande legno e rosso presents an exciting opportunity for collectors of Italian post-war art to acquire a true masterwork from Burri’s body of work.”
Monumental
and absorbing in scale, Alberto Burri’s Grande
legno e rosso stretches over eight feet in width, featuring the combination
of wood and fire that Burri had only recently introduced into his work, thus placing
it at the vanguard of his oeuvre. The work demonstrates why Burri’s artistic
output chimed so well with the atmosphere of post-war Europe. The continent had
been ravaged by the Second World War with old hierarchies having been toppled.
This was the age of Existentialism and Abstract Expressionism and, having established
his career in Rome and New York in the early 1950s, Burri’s works appeared to
challenge both. His incorporation of “poor” materials such as sackcloth and
wood revealed an artist appearing to elevate the humblest of elements into the
realm of the artistic, placing them on a previously unthinkable pedestal.
Likewise, the techniques that Burri employed, indicated an artist who was
finding new ways of making a mark on the canvas. By scorching wood and
incorporating it within the confines of a picture surface, Burri was pushing
the boundaries of art to new extremes.
Grande legno e rosso marks one of the first instances where Burri
used the most uncontrollable element of fire in his work, taking place a few
years before Yves Klein began his famous series of fire paintings. Material
is very important when considering Burri’s work, but rather than focusing on
the materials directly, he has used them as a vessel to generate an emotive
response within the viewer, much as the artists of the Arte Povera movement
would later do. Burri’s methods can be seen as paving the way for artists who
would follow him, creating an extraordinary influence on the international
scene.
By
the time that Grande legno e rosso
was created, Burri had already become an internationally-recognized artist,
having gained increasing exposure and acclaim at the beginning of the 1950s. By
1957, Burri was participating in shows throughout Italy, Europe and the States.
This rise to fame was all the more impressive as it was only during his
imprisonment in World War II that he had turned to painting as a vocation,
abandoning medicine, his former calling. While serving as a prisoner of war in
Hereford, Texas, Burri became increasingly focused upon art; although he would
later destroy many of the works from this period, he made a point of saving his
early landscape, Texas. This work,
filled with scorched red and orange and with a high horizon, can be seen as a
forebear for the composition of Grande
legno e rosso.
The importance of Grande legno e rosso is further indicated by its inclusion in the critically-acclaimed 2015 retrospective of Burri’s work held at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York. After that exhibition, the presentation of this picture at auction marks only the second occasion it has been shown publically since 1960, shortly after it was completed.
Auction: Thursday,
15 November
Location: 450 Park Avenue, New York
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*Estimates do not include buyer’s premium; prices achieved include the hammer price plus buyer’s premium.
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