The Italian painter Alberto Burri (1915-1995) worked in the collage tradition of Schwitters and the Dadaists. His art is characterized by a love for textural effects and by evocative images of war and industrial waste.

Alberto Burri was born in Città di Castello. He studied medicine and served as a surgeon in World War II. Captured by the Allies, he began painting in 1944 in a Texas prisoner-of-war camp. There he developed his surgeon's skill into artistic creation. He sewed together scraps of burlap, metal, and wood to create metaphors for torn and bleeding flesh.

When Burri returned to Rome in 1945, he gave up medicine. His early paintings, with their images of gashes, wounds, and torn and putrefying flesh, recall his wartime impressions. He ripped his materials, burned them, and then deftly stitched them together, working both as a soldier, mutilating, and as a surgeon, lovingly healing. He...