Trained as a doctor and active as a medic during World War II, Italian artist Alberto Burri was captured during a tour of North Africa and interned for several years in a remote part of Texas. It was during this period that he began to make art, and the rest of his life was devoted to the development of a series of challenging, genre-defining works. Notably, Burri held to the description of his work as painting, when in fact it was his revolutionary approach to “non-art” materials that formed the cornerstone of his practice—and would later influence a generation of American artists including Robert Rauschenberg and Cy Twombly. As critic Giulio Carlo Argan wrote in 1960, Burri’s work is the “simulation of a picture, a sort of trompe l’oeil in reverse, in which it is not painting which simulates reality, but reality that simulates painting.”

–From the Glenstone Field Guide