In addition, she intends some of the smaller
works, called «Notes,» to complement the
exhibition's main pieces, offering the artist — and, by extension, the viewer — a brief rest before and after the exertion of creating (or,
for the viewer,
absorbing) the larger - scale
works.
In their essays
for the
exhibition catalogue — a well - designed pleasure to hold and read — Cooper and Luke advance the case that, to get where he was going, Stella had to
absorb and surmount the
work of Jasper Johns, a task Stella accomplished with bravado.
Even though Burri was never explicitly tied to any movement, to most viewers his abstract «unpainted paintings» should appear comfortable in his cultural moment,
absorbing the monochromatic interests of Abstract Expressionists, while also setting the ground
for Arte Povera and assemblage art.The co-curators
work extensively to expand these associations through the
exhibition's wall labels, which relate Burri to various artists,
works, and moments far beyond the scope of midcentury abstraction, including Piero della Francesca's Madonna of Partition (1455 — 6)(
for the subject of incised fabric), Joseph Beuys (as an artist formed by war), Italian Neorealist cinema (
for its use of artifice and rupture to reappropriate the realism of Facist war propaganda), and even Rodin's Gates of Hell (1880 --- 1917)(
for the «Combustione Plastica» series» hellish melting of form).