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Prampolini Burri. Della Materia (Mousse Publishing, 2025)
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Prampolini Burri. Della Materia is the catalogue published on the occasion of the eponymous exhibition at the Collezione Giancarlo and Danna Olgiati in Lugano.
The exhibition investigates the use of alternative materials in art, in dialogue with and in contrast to traditional painting, tracing the evolution of experimental practices that emerged throughout the twentieth century in Italy. This continuous line of research into matter is exemplified in the work of Enrico Prampolini (Modena, 1894–Rome, 1956) and Alberto Burri (Città di Castello, 1915–Nice, 1995), both active in Rome.
Richly illustrated, the volume presents their exploration of the expressive potential of matter through the works on display, on loan from major international public and private collections. From Prampolini’s Futurist mixed-media compositions to Burri’s powerful material creations, the exhibition reveals how their radical use of matter captured the spirit of a complex and unsettling age, giving form to its intensity and dramatic force.
Essays by curators Gabriella Belli and Bruno Corà delve into the practices and œuvre of two seminal figures in twentieth-century Italian art.
Below you can read an excerpt from the essay by Bruno Corà featured in the publication.
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Alberto Burri, Rosso Plastica, [1964]. © Fondazione Palazzo Albizzini Collezione Burri, Città di Castello
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Burri: Matter Balanced in the Ethics of Form
by Bruno Corà
It is the Galleria Fonte d’Abisso in Milan that we have to thank for the first exhibition devoted to the work of these two artists, entitled Prampolini e Burri e la materia attiva and curated by Luciano Caramel in the fall of 1990. On that occasion the critic, in the introductory essay of the catalogue, pointed out more than once “in reference to the concrete practice, premises and results of each of the two figures, both protagonists of the century’s art scene, but under different historical circumstances,”[1] that “the lumping together of two such original and distinct artists under the label of ‘active matter’ is in no way intended to propose untenable affinities [. . .].”[2] If this is a point that Caramel frequently stresses in his reflections (other examples can be found in the same essay), similar views have been expressed, with regard to this comparison of the use they made of “material,” by scholars like Maurizio Calvesi, Vittorio Brandi Rubiu, Emilio Villa, Rosella Siligato, Maria Grazia Tolomeo, and others.
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Alberto Burri at work, 1976. © Fondazione Palazzo Albizzini Collezione Burri, Città di Castello. Photo: Aurelio Amendola
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Moreover, anyone who has read Enrico Prampolini’s theoretical essay on “polymaterialism,” “Arte polimaterica (verso un’arte collettiva?),” in the version published in Rome in 1944, will have to agree that its ideas and the practical aims of the concepts he puts forward—“the multi-material artist will have to create in a state of almost trancelike automatism [. . .] the establishment of a principle for collective purposes in the arts. Social phenomenon of our time that places the arts at the service of the masses [. . .] overcoming individualisms and the overvaluing of the self and the personal [. . .] art passes from an individual to a collective expression and moves toward a new pantheistic conception of the world and of things”[3]—are as far as could be imagined from Alberto Burri’s intuitive attitude toward the use of material and the aesthetic qualities of the work that he would begin to produce after that moment in time and above all in the late 1940s and early 1950s.
Paradoxically, however, this divergence between the two artists in their consideration and handling of “material” is precisely the aspect that has prompted us today to examine the works of both with more attention than under previous circumstances, in order to arrive at a broader understanding of the distinction between them, of their differences and the original ways they looked at material, with respect even to the wide range of experiments carried out by other artists in the history of the visual and plastic arts of the 20th century.
CONTINUE READING
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Alberto Burri, Grande Cretto di Gibellina, 1984–2015. © Fondazione Palazzo Albizzini Collezione Burri, Città di Castello
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[1] Luciano Caramel, Prampolini e Burri e la materia attiva, catalogue of the exhibition at the Galleria Fonte d’Abisso, Milan, October 17 – December 20, 1990, 9.
[2] Caramel, Prampolini e Burri, 12.
[3] Enrico Prampolini, “Arte polimaterica (verso un’arte collettiva?),” in Anticipazioni, n. 7, Serie Arti O.E.T. (Rome: Edizioni del Secolo, 1944); reprinted in Caramel, Prampolini e Burri, 10, 14.
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