Alberto Burri Artwork valuations, appraisals and auction estimates

Alberto Burri (Città di Castello, 12 March 1915 – Nice, 13 February 1995) was an Italian artist, painter and doctor.

He was born in Città di Castello (Perugia) on 12 March 1915, the eldest son of Pietro, a wine merchant, and Carolina Torreggiani, a primary school teacher [1].

After obtaining his classical high school diploma from the Liceo Scientifico Annibale Mariotti in Perugia, he enrolled in the Faculty of Medicine and Surgery of the same city university in 1934, graduating on 12 June 1940. He obtained a secondary school diploma as a medical lieutenant on 9 October 1940, he was drafted into the Army and soon discharged to train in the hospital to qualify for the profession. Read the full biography

Guide to Alberto Burri price quotations

Alberto Burri was an Italian painter and sculptor who helped pioneer the Arte Povera movement. His work often incorporated unconventional materials like burlap, plastic, and tar.  

Burri's work commands high prices at auction. His pieces are highly sought after by major collectors and museums. Some key points regarding Burri's market and prices:

• Burri's auction records are consistently strong. His work frequently sells for over €1 million at major auction houses like Christie's and Sotheby's.

• Sacchi works from Burri's early career in the 1950s tend to fetch the highest prices, often selling for €2-5 million or more. These rag sacks are considered some of his most iconic pieces.

• Large-scale paintings and sculptures also command top prices, with monumental works sometimes selling for €5-10 million or higher. Museums and institutions often acquire these major examples.

• Prices for Burri's work have generally trended upward over time. As his importance as a pioneer of Arte Povera has been cemented in art history, the value of his oeuvre has grown steadily.

• Burri's market remains relatively stable. While not as volatile as some contemporary artists, his work consistently performs well at auction and there is a healthy demand from collectors.

In summary, Alberto Burri's work fetches high prices at auction, often in the multi-million euro range for major examples. As his stature has grown, so too have the values of his paintings, sculptures and other works. A healthy market exists for both primary and secondary market Burri pieces among major collectors and museums.

Alberto Burri Biography

Alberto Burri (Città di Castello, 12 March 1915 – Nice, 13 February 1995) was an Italian artist, painter and doctor.

He was born in Città di Castello (Perugia) on 12 March 1915, the eldest son of Pietro, a wine merchant, and Carolina Torreggiani, a primary school teacher [1].

After obtaining his classical high school diploma from the Liceo Scientifico Annibale Mariotti in Perugia, he enrolled in the Faculty of Medicine and Surgery of the same city university in 1934, graduating on 12 June 1940. He obtained a secondary school diploma as a medical lieutenant on 9 October 1940, he was drafted into the Army and soon discharged to train in the hospital to qualify for the profession. After graduation, he returned to the army and was assigned to the 10th North African Army Corps in early March 1943. During the days of Italy's surrender in Africa, he was captured by the British and fell into American hands on the 8th May 1943, where he was locked up in a "criminal camp" together with Giuseppe Beto and Beppe Nicolai Mid-Hereford. field collaborator. (In Texas) He was there for 18 months. In the spring of 1944 he refused to sign a declaration of collaboration that had been proposed to him, and was counted among the "Irriducible Fascists". It was during this period that he developed the conviction to devote himself to painting.

On February 27, 1946, he returned from captivity in the United States, arrived in Naples on February 27, 1946, and lived briefly in Città di Castello before moving to Rome, where he lived on Via Mario de' Fiori. He shared a studio nearby, Plaza de España, with his sculptor friend Edgardo Manucci.

In July 1947 the first personal exhibition favored by the architect Amedeo Luccichenti was held at the Galleria La Margherita of Gaspero del Corso and Irene Brin, of the poets Libero de Libero and Leonardo Sinisgalli. The works on display are still figurative in nature, thanks also to the tonal paintings of the Roman school of the 1930s. During the exhibition he met the sculptor Pericle Fazzini, vice-president of the Art Club, an important Roman artistic association, also open to innovations in concrete abstraction: already in December 1947 he participated in the second annual exhibition. The association continued to exhibit with the "Art Club" until the early 1950s, both in Italy and abroad.

In May 1948, in his second personal exhibition: Bianchi e Catrami, again at the Galleria La Margherita, he presented for the first time abstract works whose forms, now amoeba and organic, now filamentous and reticulate, reveal some similarities with the language of Jean Arp , Paul Klee and Joan Mirò. Subsequently he began to develop the first tars, in which the quality of the materials (they were made on canvas with oil, tar, sand, vinyl, pumice and other materials) began to take over the simple formal organization of the composition.

At the end of 1948 he went to Paris to visit Miró's studio, to see Alberto Magnelli's latest abstract works in Italy and to learn about the works exhibited at the René Drouin gallery. The gallery has become one of the most important centers of the new season. Artistic, then called "informal".

In 1949 he created the first printed bag SZ1.

In 1950 he began creating the Le Muffe e i Gobbi collection and used the material consumed in the bags for the first time. 1950 was a year of great experimentation, he painted various moulds, using the atmospheric agents produced by pumice to combine with traditional oil painting, including the first hunchback, the characteristic swelling obtained by placing wooden branches on the back of the canvas, the first bag, Made entirely of jute, patched and sewn. Also in 1950 he created large "Fiat panels" (squares almost 5 m on each side) for the showroom of a Roman car dealership.

In January 1951 he participated in the foundation of the Origine Group together with Mario Ballocco, Giuseppe Capogrossi and Ettore Colla. And he participated in the group's founding exhibition, which was disbanded the following year.

1952 Personal exhibition "Neri e Muffe" at the Galleria dell'Obelisco, Rome. In April the exhibition "Homage to Leonardo" was held at the Origine Foundation of his friend Colla, in which he exhibited works such as "Lo Strappo", the first exhibition rejected by the jury only a few months later. the bags at the Venice Biennale. The "Study for the Strap" purchased by Lucio Fontana was included in the "Black and White" section of the Venetian exhibition. On 17 May Burri was among the signatories of the "Manifesto of the movement for television space" promoted by Fontana himself. During the year he moved to via Margutta, to a studio on the border with the embankment of the painters Franco Gentilini and Pincio. In the same year, Robert Rauschenberg spent almost a year in Rome, visiting Alberto Brie's studio, and thus got an idea of ​​Sacchi.

Great international success began with exhibitions in Chicago and New York in 1953. The first American solo exhibition (Alberto Burri: Paintings and Collages) was held at the Allan Frumkin Gallery in Chicago from January 13 to February 7, 1953; at the end of the year it was moved to the Eleanor Ward's Stable Gallery in New York. In the meantime, Burri met the critic James Johnson Sweeney, then director of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York, who decided to promote his work through the support of critics, which led to the first monograph A dedicated to him (1955) and includes some of his works in the museum's exhibitions. A new solo exhibition of the poet Emilio Villa, and the collaboration continued in the following years.

1954 was marked by the move to the studio in Via Salaria and the entry into a group of artists supported by the French critic Michel Tapi, father of art. Towards the end of the year he began to use fire in his work, making his first small burns on paper.

On May 15, 1955, in Westport (California), he married Minsa Craig (1928-2003), a Ukrainian-American dancer he had met in Rome the previous year. In the same period he held the group exhibition "A New Decade: 22 European Painters and Sculptors" at the Museum of Modern Art in New York (May-August), featuring five of his works; artists who can be found in the relevant catalogue. One of the few poetic statements can be traced back to that exhibition. Also in 1955 he successfully participated in the Rome Quadrennial and the Sao Paulo Biennial in Brazil.

Despite the success and support of his friend Afro Basaldella, he was only allowed to exhibit two works at the 1956 Venice Biennale. However, in September, while the Biennale was still ongoing, the Galleria del Cavallino in Venice hosted for him an exhibition, in which many of the bags for which he is now famous are displayed.

Meanwhile, Burri continued to perform multiple burns (with wood, canvas, and plastic) and experiment with the properties of wood.

1957 is characterized by numerous personal exhibitions in Italy and the United States. By the end of the year he produced his first irons, in which he exploited the possibilities offered by welding techniques in a two-dimensional graphic discourse. The first of these works maintained the compositional relationships of bags, wood and plastic, while Burri subsequently developed a more rigorous layout consistent with the properties of the new materials used.

Exhibition activity in 1959 and early 1960 was quite intense. In June, Brie received a room at the Venice Biennale, where she also received an award from the International Association of Art Critics. In the same year Giovanni Carandente moved his residence to via Grottarossa, outside Rome, to make his first documentary.

Although he continued to exhibit in solo and group exhibitions, extensive travel between Mexico and the United States and the aftermath of a delicate surgery slowed his creative pace.

In the early 1960s the first anthology summaries were reported in Paris, Rome, L'Aquila, Livorno and Houston, Minneapolis, Buffalo, Pasadena, etc. The new contribution, which will become reality, is a historical retrospective of Darmstadt, Rotterdam, Turin and Paris (1967-1972).

At the end of 1962, the year in which he purchased Villa Case Nove in Morra near Città di Castello, he returned to the limelight with the results of his last months of work. From December 1962 to January 1963, a plastic exhibition was held at the Marlborough Gallery in Rome which represented a new and unexpected turning point after the Flatiron. Perhaps reworking some mid-1950s plastic, he decided to focus on clear plastic film.

The new season of plastic art lasted ten years, and Cesare Brandi was its main interpreter: he presented many exhibitions and wrote a fundamental monograph on Burri (1963).

In 1963 he designed the sets and costumes for five ballets by the American pianist, conductor and composer Morton Gould at La Scala in Milan. In the same year one of his works was exhibited at an exhibition of contemporary Italian painting in several Australian cities. In 1963-64 he participated in the exhibition Peintures italiennes d'aujourd'hui in the Middle East and North Africa. In 1964 he won the Mazzotto Painting Prize.

In the late 1960s he purchased a house in Los Angeles, California, where he spent the winters until 1990. During this period and the subsequent early 1970s, he remained engaged in theater production.

The Seventies document the decrease in technical and formal means from Cretti (earth and vinavil) to Cellotex (compressed for industrial use), and are followed by historical retrospectives: Assisi, Rome, Lisbon, Madrid, Los Angeles, San Antonio, Milwaukee, New York , Naples.

In those years he also began working on cretti, a material derived from a measured mixture of acrylic vinyl binders with other materials used to cover the supports (clay, kaolin, zinc white), where he worked on the supports for ten years and exhibited for the first time, in October 1973 in Bologna (Galleria di San Luca).

An anthological exhibition at the Convent of San Francisco d'Assisi in May 1975 also presented to the public Fibra, a recently constructed insulating material used in construction, made up of a mixture of glue and wood chips.

In the meantime, exhibition activity continues uninterrupted, although with less intensity than in previous decades.

Creti's cycle begins in 1973, when he covers the remains of Gibellina in the earthquake area, a famous example of land art, with a veil of concrete. In the same year Burri received the Ferrinelli Prize. Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei per la Grafica, with the following motivation: "Despite its apparent simplicity, the quality and invention of the graphics created in a very modern key marry perfectly with the artist's painting, which is not yet an incidental aspect, but almost a vividness that combines extreme rigor with an unparalleled expressive purity."

In 1975 he participated in the "Operazione Alsevia" project coordinated by the architect Ico Parisi to build a community from scratch in the city of Alsevia, in the province of Ancona, with the contribution of artists, musicians, critics, writers, filmmaker, psychologist, local agency. Burri created the sketches for the theatre, today preserved in the collection of Palazzo Albizzini.

In 1976 Alberto Burri (with the "technique" of potter Massimo Baldelli) created a spectacular piece, "Great Black Cretto", which was exhibited at the Franklin D. Murphy Sculpture Garden at the University of Los Angeles (UCLA). Another work similar in style, expressiveness and spectacular dimensions is exhibited at the Capodimonte Museum in Naples. The most striking evolution, however, is that of Gibellina (Trapani). Almost 90,000 m2 among the rubble of old Gibellina. The project started in August 1985 and was stopped in December 1989 due to lack of funds and the project has not yet been completed.

In 1977 he exhibited an important anthology entitled "Alberto Burri. A retrospective View 1948-77" at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York.

The cycle dates back to 1979, which will dominate all his subsequent works, including ten monumental works that retrace the most important moments of his artistic practice, but rather the season that began the great pictorial cycle, also in the subsequent Produced in several years and permanently exhibited at the Ex - Macello Tabacchi in Città di Castello. He will present other cycles in Florence (1981), Palm Springs (1982), Venice (1983), Nice (1985), Rome, Turin (1989) and Rivoli (1991)

In 1981 the Burri Foundation was established at Palazzo Albizzini in Città di Castello with the first donation of 32 works.

In 1984 Burri set up a detailed exhibition to open Brera's activity to the contemporary.

In 1994 Brie participated in the exhibition Italian Transfiguration 1943-1968 at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York. From 11 May to 30 June 1994, at the National Art Gallery in Athens, the Burri series the Polyptych of Athens, Architecture with Cacti, will be presented at the Italian Cultural Institute in Madrid (1995). On 10 December 1994, Burri's donation to the Uffizi Gallery in Florence was commemorated: a black and white painting from 1969 and three series of figures from 1993-94.

The works of the masters are mainly exhibited in the two museums of the Città di Castello. The first is in "Palazzo Albizzini", with a surface area of ​​1660 m2, inaugurated in 1981. The second which houses the artist's "Great Painting Cycle", inaugurated in 1990, is a disused industrial area where the "Ex Tobacco squeegees" architecturally restored. At Palazzo Albizzini, where the foundation of the same name was founded in 1978 at the behest of Burri himself, and at the Ex Seccatoi, inaugurated as an exhibition venue in July 1990, the artist established the collection that he donated to his hometown. He matured at the end of the Eighties and operated under his careful direction through museum itineraries and systematic catalogs organized in both locations, thus providing a precise hypothesis to explain his work, in which large sculptures, at the same time, began to work on the great pictorial cycle.

At the beginning of the 1990s, Burri and his wife left California to settle in Beaulieu-sur-Mer on the French Riviera (France), continuing to spend the summers in Città di Castello. Despite his advanced age, he continues to experiment with new materials: his latest work is Metamorfex, a cycle of nine pieces presented in Ex Seccatoi by his friend Nemo Sarteaanesi. Burri died in Nice on 13 February 1995, a month before his 80th birthday. Known for his secrecy, he eventually completed a lengthy recording of his autobiography with Stefano Zorzi, who collected its contents in a volume entitled "The Words of Burri". His work has been exhibited in some of the most important museums in the world: the Center Georges Pompidou in Paris, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York, the Tate Gallery in London, the National Gallery of Modern and Contemporary Art in Rome, Castello of Rivoli (TO), Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art of Trento and Rovereto.