Il senno di prima : Alberto Burri per gli anni Settanta

The paper examines the critical reception of Alberto Burri’s work during the Seventies, in the broader context of the artist’s practice and exhibition history. In particular, it focuses on how the reading of the artist’s work has changed in response to the progressive evolution of the most advanced Italian and international artistic research. Starting from the end of the Sixties and arriving at the beginning of the Eighties, the paper investigates how Burri’s work has been arbitrarily related to the practices of Arte Povera, Minimalism, Pittura analitica, and Transavanguardia. Burri’s practice, often relegated to a supra-historical dimension, is thus set in the midst of one of the decades of maximum redefinition of Italian artistic practices, in which he acted as a true protagonist, while maintaining his proverbial reserve and silence.