Published to accompany a major retrospective exhibition - the first in the United States in more than 35 years and the most comprehensive ever mounted - this title showcases the pioneering work of Italian artist Alberto Burri (1915-1995). Exploring the beauty and complexity of Burri's process-based works, the exhibition positions the artist as a central and singular protagonist of postwar art. Burri is best known for his series of Sacchi (sacks) made of stitched and patched remnants of torn burlap bags, often combined with fragments of discarded clothing. Far less familiar are his other series, which this exhibition represents in depth: Catrami (tars), Gobbi (hunchbacks), Muffe (molds), Bianchi (whites), Legni (woods), Ferri (irons), Combustioni plastiche (plastic combustions), Cretti and Cellotex works. Burri's work both demolished and reconfigured the Western pictorial tradition, while reconceptualizing modernist collage. Using unconventional materials, he moved beyond the painted surfaces and mark making of American Abstract Expressionism and European Art Informel. Burri's unprecedented approaches to manipulating humble substances - and his abject picture-objects - also profoundly influenced Arte Povera, Neo-Dada and Process art.

An affordable introduction to the Art Informel pioneer's poetical use of everyday materials A leading light of the Art Informel generation that also included Tàpies and Dubuffet, Alberto Burri (1915-95) continues to exert a huge influence on artists today, as the popularity of his 2015 Guggenheim show and the perpetual scarcity of Burri monographs attests. This volume--the most comprehensive book on the artist in print--explores the beauty and complexity of the creative process, "material poetry," that undergirded all of his work. Burri worked with the most varied materials with an inexhaustible creative energy: tar, paper, fabric, jute sacks, combustions of plastic, wood and iron all found their way into his picture plane, transfiguring the vocabulary of painting for the postwar sensibility. The titles of Burri's various series convey this "material poetry" Gobbi (hunchbacks), Muffe (molds), Bianchi (whites), Legni (woods), Ferri (irons), Combustioni plastiche (plastic combustions), Cretti and Cellotex. This affordable volume introduces Burri's poetical vocabulary of materials for a new audience.

Part of the avant-garde Origin Group in Rome in the 1950s, Alberto Burri championed the use of found, non-art materials, and made bold artistic inventions. This book takes a close look at Burri's entire output, which includes a range of works -- from monumental sculpture to painting cycles. A physician by training, the important Italian artist Alberto Burri (1915-95) gave up his profession in 1944 to dedicate himself to painting.

A member of the famous artist-owned photo agency Magnum Photos, Swiss photographer René Burri (1933-2014) found himself wherever history was happening during the late twentieth century. His countless travels took him across Europe and the Americas to the Middle East to Japan and China to document the twentieth century's major events. His extraordinary sense for people and their personalities resulted in remarkably candid portraits of celebrities, such as architects Le Corbusier, Oscar Niemeyer, and Luis Barragán; artists Alberto Giacometti, Pablo Picasso, and Jean Tinguely; and Che Guevara, whose 1963 portrait with a cigar is one of the world's most famous and widely reproduced photographic portraits. Published to coincide with a major exhibition at Musée de l'Elysée, Lausanne, René Burri: Explosions of Sight draws from Burri's vast archive. With the museum, Burri staged both his first exhibition and his first major retrospective and maintained a close relationship throughout his life, entrusting it also with the conservation of his estate. The book brings together for the first time Burri's entire body of work, both photographic and nonphotographic, including previously unpublished archival documents, as well as book designs, exhibition projects, travel diaries, collages, watercolors, and objects Burri collected. In doing so, it offers a new and uniquely intimate view of one of the world's greatest photographers.