He had connections with Lucio Fontana's spatialism and, with Antoni Tàpies, an influence on the revival of the art of post-war assembly in the United States (Robert Rauschenberg) as in Europe.

[10] On 8 May 1943 the unit he was part of was captured by the British in Tunisia and was later turned over to the Americans and transferred to Hereford, Texas in a prisoner-of-war camp housing around 3000 Italian officers,[11] where he began painting.

[13] Shutting himself off from the rest of the world, and depicting figurative subjects on thick chromatic marks, he progressively realized the desire of abandoning the medical profession, in favor of painting.

In some artworks of the same period which he called Gobbi (Hunchbacks), Burri focused on the painting's spatial interaction, achieving another original outcome due to the incorporation of tree branches on the rear of the canvas which pushed two-dimensionality towards Three-dimensional space.

[26] The formal artistic elegance and the spatial balances obtained through aeroform steams, craters, rips, overlapping color layers and different forms, differentiated Burri's art, founded on attentive reflections and precise calculations, from the impulsive gestures that characterized Action painting during the same period.

[27] Burri offered an initial view of these peculiar elements in 1949, with SZ1 (acronym for Sacco di Zucchero 1 meaning Sack of Sugar, 1): the presence of a portion of the american flag contained in the artwork anticipated the use of the same subject made by pop art.

[30] This encounter subsequently led to a life-long friendship with Sweeney becoming an active a proponent of Burri's art in leading American Museums and writing the very first monograph about the artist in 1955.

[31][32][33] Burri's strong relationship with the United States became official when he met Minsa Craig (1928–2003), an American ballet dancer (student of Martha Graham) and choreographer whom he married on 15 May 1955 in Westport, Connecticut.

[34] After a few sporadic attempts, in 1953–54 Burri conducted a carefully planned experimentation with fire, through small combustions on paper, which served as illustrations for a book of poems by Emilio Villa.

[38] In the same period Burri was also working on the Ferri (Irons), creations made out of metal sheets cut, and welded by Blow torch, to aim the general balance of the elements.

Burri arrested the heating process at the desired moment using a PVA glue layer, thus obtaining greater and lesser cracking effects, which were always balanced thanks to the painter's extensive knowledge of chemistry.

[42] Burri reproduced the procedure used for the Cretti, either black or white, also in sculpture, on large extensions in the University of California, Los Angeles and Naples (Museo di Capodimonte) Grandi Cretti (Large Cracks) made of baked clay (both 49 x 16) and, most importantly, in the vast cement covering of the Cretto di Burri at Gibellina, upon the ruins of the old small Sicilian town destroyed by the 1968 earthquake.

[44] The privileged material during this phase is Celotex (the author added an l to its name), an industrial mixture of wood production scraps and adhesives, very often used in the making of insulating boards.

An example is the recurrent motif of the archivolt, viewed in its plain form in painting and in perspective in such iron sculptures as Teatro Scultura – a work presented at 1984 Venice Biennale –, and in the 1972 Ogive series in ceramics.

[48] The strong continuity of Burri's sculptural works with his paintings can also be seen in the Los Angeles UCLA and Naples Capodimonte ceramic Grandi Cretti (with the help of the long collaborator ceramist Massimo Baldelli), or in the Grande Ferro (Large Iron) exhibited in Perugia on the occasion of the 1980 meeting between the artist and Joseph Beuys.

The painter's Plastiche emphasized the dramatic force of such plays as the 1969 Ignazio Silone stage adaptation in San Miniato (Pisa) and Tristan and Iseult, performed in 1975 at the Teatro Regio in Turin.

He participated intensively in the experimentation of new printing techniques as the 1965 reproduction of the Combustioni – in which the husband and wife team of Valter and Eleonora Rossi perfectly succeeded in mimicking the effect of burning on paper –, or the irregular Cretti cavities (1971) with the same printers.

[53] Just before his death, the painter was awarded the Legion of Honour and the title Order of Merit of the Italian Republic, besides being named an honorary member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

The 15th century Patrician house, belonged to the patrons of Raphael's Wedding of the Virgin, was refurbished by the architects Alberto Zanmatti and Tiziano Sarteanesi in accordance with Burri's own plans.

[59][60] The second collection is that of the Città di Castello former tobacco drying sheds, an industrial structure gradually abandoned during the 1960s and inaugurated in 1990, expanding over an area of 11,500 square meters.

[60] The structure's black exterior and the particular space adaptations represent one last attempt by Burri to create a total work of art, in continuity with the idea of formal and psychological balance he constantly pursued.

"[67] Burri's career began in Rome with a first solo exhibition in 1947 at La Margherita bookshop, owned by Irene Brin, where he presented his first abstract works the following year.

In the same year, the director and curator of Guggenheim Museum James Johnson Sweeney included Burri in the landmark exhibition Younger European Painters: A Selection bringing his work to focus in the international community.

The first anthological retrospectives were held around this time and in the following decade, as the solo exhibitions at the Musée National d'Art Moderne in Paris (1972), the one in Francis of Assisi Sacred Convent (1975) and the great traveling exhibit which started at the UCLA's Frederick S. Wight Gallery in Los Angeles, moved to the Marion Koogler McNay Art Institute in San Antonio (Texas) and ended in 1978 at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum.

In 2015–16 the major retrospective exhibition The Trauma of Painting organized by Emily Braun at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York (later at the Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, Düsseldorf in 2016) received much international attention to the painter's art.

In 2017 John Densmore (The Doors) performed in front of the Grande Nero Cretto (Large Black Crack) at UCLA, Los Angeles during the event Burri Prometheia.