Alberto Burri

Alberto Burri was an Italian painter and sculptor. He started his life not as an artist but as a doctor, and this could argued that this inspired a lot of his work as an artist. During World War II he served as a physician in the Italian army and was taken captive in Texas . When the war ended he decided to become a painter and move to Rome.

His early work was abstraction, and soon became a proponent of Art Informal. In the late 1940's he began to experiment with various unorthodox materials and started fabricating tactile collages with pumice and burlap.

Sacking and Red 1954

 The work which caught my attention was 'Sacking and Red' which is a canvas painted red with rags of rough sacking stitched to each other and on the canvas. To me it could be interpreted as a close up of a bleeding body, with the rags symbolising stitched up or scarred skin. But the piece of work is highly abstract and this is just my interpretation. The fact that he lived through and experienced the Second World War further justifies my interpretation, and he could be subliminally expressing the horrors he saw as a medic in the war.

Because I'm looking at skin and scars, I think there is a strong link between the artist and my work. I also want to present the idea of skin and scars, but not in an obvious way. Like how Burri uses rags, my chosen material to represent skin is tights, an everyday material or object which holds a lot of possibilities.