From Alberto Burri to the Japanese School Fashion Designers
From 16 April to 5 May 2026, the exhibition project “Abitare il Nero. Da Alberto Burri ai Fashion Designer della Scuola giapponese” (Inhabiting Black. From Alberto Burri to the Japanese School Fashion Designers) will be hosted by CUBO, the Unipol Group’s Corporate Museum in the Unipol Tower in Milan, where Alberto Burri’s masterpiece Nero con punti (Black with Dots), which is part of Unipol’s Artistic Heritage, will be juxtaposed to five extraordinary creations by Issey Miyake, Yohji Yamamoto and Junya Watanabe, who are among the most radical contemporary Japanese designers.
This ambitious exhibition project, entrusted to curator and fashion theorist Silvia Casagrande, is the latest stage in the journey to enhance Burri’s work, which began in 2019 with its restoration and subsequent exhibition in Bologna at the CUBO exhibition spaces, enriched by a study day on the Umbrian master.
Today’s goal is to amplify and relaunch the relevance and modernity of his work: the large jute canvas “on which, in 1958, Alberto Burri dramatically spread monochrome paint, dark as ebony and inescapable as the night, opening a wound at its centre, then mending it and thus eternally reminding us of the rift in the world” – as described in the study booklet edited by Ilaria Bignotti – constitutes a work of capital importance in a time rife with geopolitical conflict and change like today.
The exquisite eco-restoration of the canvas has been carried out in collaboration with Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche (CNR, Italian National Research Council) in Florence by using a plant-based product extracted from Japanese Funori algae, used for centuries in the East for the restoration of porous materials such as paper and fabrics, and virtually unknown in the West.
This is where the connection between the Italian master’s work and the Land of the Rising Sun emerges, revealing surprising affinities between Burri and the Japanese fashion designers.
Alongside the theme of black, there is that of shadow, emptiness, folds, cuts, stitching, and structure, intertwined with the experiments of fashion masters who have been revolutionising the language of clothing since the 1980s.
In these new creations, fabric becomes a metaphor for skin: the exposed lacerations break the mould of the perfect, tailored suit, opening up a new aesthetic of wounded material. In this tension between matter and silence one can discern a profound connection with Alberto Burri’s research, where surface irregularities become a place of transformation and memory. As in Burri’s works, in Japanese fashion too, a wound in the material is not destruction, but language: black makes the void visible and turns absence into a form of eloquence.
Find more: https://www.cubounipol.it/it/mostre/abitare-il-nero/
