Inhabit the Blackness
From Alberto Burri to Japanese Fashion Designers
The research project, curated by Silvia Casagrande, takes the form of a site-specific installation hosted at the Unipol Tower, the Milan headquarters of the Unipol Group in Piazza Gae Aulenti, on the occasion of Design Week and MIART. It is accompanied by a scholarly booklet edited by Ilaria Bignotti and represents a new stage in a fascinating journey launched by CUBO Unipol in 2019, aimed at continuing the historical narrative of the painting and deepening its dialogue with contemporary themes.
The exhibition originates from a research project that brings into dialogue the masterpiece Nero con punti (1958) by Alberto Burri—part of the Unipol Group’s artistic heritage—with five textile creations by Japanese fashion designers Issey Miyake, Yohji Yamamoto, and Junya Watanabe.
The curator selected the garments, generously loaned by the Archivi di Ricerca Mazzini, and built around them a critical relationship with Burri’s work. Her text takes its cue from the essay Libro d’ombra (In Praise of Shadows) by Japanese writer Jun’ichirō Tanizaki, tracing a philosophical bridge between the Japanese aesthetic of shadow and a poetics of black understood as matter, silence, and space.
Nero con punti is a large burlap canvas on which, in 1958, Alberto Burri laid a monochrome black paint, opening at its center a wound that was later stitched closed with threads and cords: a gesture that is both painterly and surgical, an allegory of rupture and the possible re-composition of the world.
Between 2019 and 2022, the work underwent a scientific eco-restoration conducted by conservator Muriel Vervat in collaboration with the Restoration Research Area of the Italian National Research Council (CNR) in Florence. The intervention involved the use of funori, a natural plant-based product extracted from Japanese seaweed and used for centuries in the East to consolidate textiles and paper—a subtle yet significant link between the materiality of the artwork and Japanese culture, forming the first conceptual thread of the project.
In February 2023, CUBO dedicated a multidisciplinary study day to the painting, Luce sul Nero (Light on Black), organized in collaboration with the Fondazione Palazzo Albizzini – Collezione Burri in Città di Castello, involving art critics, semioticians, musicologists, philosophers, and fashion design curators.
The Milan exhibition now represents a new chapter in this journey: a further stage that brings the restored masterpiece into a new space and opens it to an unprecedented dialogue, in which art, fashion, and thought intertwine around the themes of the body, fabric, and shadow.
© Yohji Yamamoto, Outerwear (detail), Fall/Winter 2019–2020. Courtesy Archivi Mazzini.
© Alberto Burri, Nero con punti (detail), 1958, Unipol Group Artistic Heritage. Fondazione Palazzo Albizzini – Collezione Burri, Città di Castello
