Belonging to Burri’s most distinguished series, Sacco e Nero 3 marks the apogee of the artist’s Sacchi (Sack) works. Produced between 1950 and 1956, they represent an unprecedented exploration of material possibility. Predominantly painted in a sombre black, with tracks of red and areas of raw and exposed earthy brown, Burri constructs a sutured patchwork of variously cut and torn swatches of burlap and fabric. Minimal in colour palette yet rich in textural complexity, Burri demonstrates his pioneering ability to transmute humble materials – unorthodox for artistic creation – into surfaces akin to visceral, living flesh that pulse with a certain corporeal weight. Simultaneously conveying a dark void and a healing wound, Sacco e Nero 3 subverts conventional painting practice, asserting his vital role as a predecessor of the pivotal Arte Povera movement.

Sacco e Nero 3 displays a complexity of layering and stitching that marks a development upon Burri’s earlier more minimalistic experimentations with burlap. Characteristic of Burri’s Sacchi, the present work was likely constructed from worn-out burlap bags he salvaged from the mill in his home city of Città di Castello, which he then later transformed in his studio in Rome. A material that holds a prehistory in Burri’s experiences as medical personnel during WWII and later as a prisoner of war, burlap was first encountered by the artist as an all-purpose material – made into tents, curtains, and camouflage for helmets, trucks, and munitions. In confronting his material associations with burlap and transforming it into artwork, Burri reveals a unique material relationship. In many ways, the redemptive resonances of Sacco e Nero 3 finds its closest comparison in the neorealist cinema produced in Italy; the films of De Sica, Roberto Rossellini, and Luchino Visconti similarly reflected upon the dismal conditions of Italy’s post-war socioeconomic landscape.

To construct Sacco e Nero 3, Burri engaged in a meticulous, iterative process, working between the front and back of the composition. He wove burlap with black fabric, securing the assemblage with vinavil, and frequently repositioned the materials – at t.mes s on the floor, other t.mes s on a table – to refine his envisioned arrangement by hand. Characteristic of his later Sacchi, he employed a sewing machine to create the sketch-like stitching that delineates the rightmost piece of brown burlap, introducing an expressive, almost calligraphic quality to the surface. Throughout this process, Burri intermittently mounted the work on his studio walls, scrutinising its evolving structure and making subtle adjustments, ensuring a dynamic interplay between spontaneity and control. Burri’s colour palette in Sacco e Nero 3 is demonstrative of the artist’s later black-on-black compositions – black paint, black cloth, and black patches – that work constructively to unify the background; here, tone and texture function as interruptions to the unison of colour. To scan one’s eyes across the surface of Sacco e Nero 3, entering the voids of black, is therefore to become aware of the phenomenology of one’s perceptions.

Layered beneath sections of loosely woven burlap and peering beyond the material’s edges is Burri’s striking vermilion hue, evoking an image of physical trauma – akin to a bloody gash covered by gauze. To this end, the composition is reminiscent of living flesh – it becomes a sentient surface. t.mes and t.mes again, Burri reminds his viewer that he is the artist of wounds, a title that underscores his place within the canonical narrative of post-war artists who sought to collapse the painting surface as it had previously been understood. Much like his contemporary Lucio Fontana, and the sharp incisions of his Tagli, Burri radically challenged pre-existing definitions of painting. In the loose and ragged tears that delineate the multi-layered fabrics of the present work’s surface, Sacco e Nero 3 is undeniably grounded in both the ontology of the material and the ontology of painting. Despite the semblance of dissolution, the sacks hold together, with fragments of fabric braced by the stitched and glued seams. There is a restorative function to the labyrinth of borders and edges. As Emily Braun, co-curator of Burri’s Guggenheim retrospective, observed, “[the Sacchi] test the limits of their materials and of their identity as pictures, but neither state of existence – coarse matter or abstract composition – dominates the other” (Emily Braun, “Touch and Empathy,” in Exh. Cat., New York, Guggenheim, Alberto Burri: The Trauma of Painting, 2015 –2016, p. 46).

Befitting the importance of the present work, Sacco e Nero 3 holds an illustrious and global exhibition history. First exhibited in 1955 at the prestigious São Paulo Art Biennial in its third iteration, Sacco e Nero 3 was selected for the highly praised Italian section, curated with the intention to make Western contemporary art accessible to an international audience. Later exhibited in 1959 at the second edition of documenta, Sacco e Nero 3 was selected for its pioneering material innovation, in an exhibition regarded for its its cutting-edge survey and forum of contemporary art. During the 1960s, the present work was shown widely across Italy, later selected for the exhibition Alberto Burri and Lucio Fontana, organised by New York’s Museum of Modern Art that travelled across the U.S. from 1966 to 1968. Shown in eleven institutions across the country, Sacco e Nero 3 was selected as one of two examples of Burri’s later Sacco works. Exhibited for its ability to embody qualities of Burri’s oeuvre, Sacco e Nero 3 continues to demonstrate its relevance to the artist’s oeuvre, and to contemporary artistic practice.

With a career marked by ceaseless material exploration, Burri produced several series of highly tactile works that investigated form and structure using unconventional painting supports. These notably began with the burlap sacks in his Sacchi series, followed by the insulation material Celotex in his Cellotex works (1969–1994), and the wood veneer, cold-rolled steel, and plastic sheeting in his Combustioni investigations (circa 1955–1970). It is the Sacchi that continue to hold the most critical acclaim, given their ability to emphasise Burri’s role as an “artist-repairer” (Ibid., p. 55), as Sweeney famously described him, but also given their influence on subsequent art history, to a degree comparable to Jackson Pollock’s first drip paintings. The influential role of Burri’s material radicalism informed a generation of Arte Povera artists; Jannis Kounellis, in his rearrangement of burlap bags and use of fire, is indebted to Burri; whilst Giovanni Anselmo, like Burri, departed from traditional understandings of composition and authorship. Moreover, Burri worked in response to Jean Dubuffet’s bodily imagery made from the agglomeration of pigments, a dialogue that Dubuffet later reciprocated with his Texturologies of the late 1950s. News of Burri’s unprecedented artistic output had reached America and in 1953 Robert Rauschenberg had a career-defining visit to Burri’s studio, prompting his embedded textile paintings, while Michelangelo Pistoletto produced his mise-en-scène with rags, drawing direct influence from Burri’s Sacchi.

Compositionally bare yet suffused by emotion and memory, this powerful painting is emblematic of Burri’s complex, disquieting and oblique engagement with conflict and material, as tainted by memory. Burri’s Sacco e Nero 3 is a work that is as avant-garde as it is elegiac, and as conceptually rigorous as it is evocative in content, beseeching its viewer’s empathy while confronting his past experiences of war and imprisonment. While deeply rooted in his personal biography, the work also speaks directly to the post-war Italian landscape that, though in recovery, had in large part been scorched by charred soot-black, seeping from a wound of scarlet red – battered but unbowed.