By the middle of the decade, Burri had begun experimenting with fire—to make a series of works he called “Combustione”—burning iron, wood, plastic and burlap with a blowtorch. Two such burlap creations, known as his “Sacco Combustione,” have appeared at auction in the past decade, selling for around $500,000 each. One of these, from 1953, achieved £341,250 ($565,368) at Christie’s London in 2003. Around the same time as his “Combustione,” Burri was also producing the “Legni” (“Wood”) pieces that he assembled and marked with charred gashes—and his “Ferri” (“Iron”) wall hangings, made of sheets of iron welded together and scorched to evoke a raw industrial brutality. Works from the former series have lately sold at auction for between $200,000 and $500,000. The “Ferri” fetch upwards of $400,000; a particularly large one from 1958, Grande Ferro, measuring 79 by 77 inches, sold for £624,000 ($1.18 million) at Christie’s London in 2006.

The darkness of these pieces is not necessarily a reflection of a turbulent existence— Burri’s career and personal life appear to have thrived during this period. In 1951 he married the woman with whom he would spend the rest of his life, Minsa Craig, an avant-garde dancer and choreographer from Wisconsin. In 1953 his group exhibition at the Guggenheim—curated by James Johnson Sweeney, who would go on to organize a show of Burri’s paintings in 1957–58 at the Museum of Art at the Carnegie Institute, in Pittsburgh—put Burri on the map of contemporary art.

In the early ’60s, the artist applied his blowtorch to plastic, creating his “Plastiche” series. The pieces, composed of puckered, gnarled gobs of the melted material, today go for anywhere from $100,000 to $600,000. Meanwhile, he continued to win critical recognition. In 1960 he was awarded the Critic’s Prize at the Venice Biennale and in 1965 the Grand Prize at the São Paulo Biennale. New York’s Museum of Modern Art organized a major traveling exhibition of his and Fontana’s work that ran from 1966 through 1968.

In the 1970s, Burri was dividing his time between his home in the mountains of Umbria and one in Los Angeles, where Craig had professional ties. Dating to this period is his “Cretti” series: delicately cracked monochrome “paintings” resembling sun-scorched patches of earth, made with an industrial building and insulating material called Celotex. Fewer than a handful of the “Cretti” have appeared at auction over the past 20 years. In a rare treat for collectors, three, priced from $500,000 to $2 million, surfaced last December in an exhibition of works from the estate of Craig, who died in 2003, at New York’s Mitchell-Innes & Nash, which represents the estate. The show also contained 14 pieces from other periods. Among the eager buyers was übercollector Howard Rachofsky, who purchased Rosso Plastica L.A., a “Combustione” painting from 1966 in which melted plastic is draped and gnarled around a black hole.

This February the show traveled from New York to De Pury & Luxembourg gallery in Zurich, where it was augmented with the addition of some Burris from private European collections as well as 12 hard-edge abstractions depicting bright red and orange organic forms set against a black background. Commissioned for an exhibition at the Palm Springs Desert Museum in the early ’80s, when Burri had just started using Celotex as a painting surface, the “Palm Springs Cycle,” as it is known, was priced between $5 million and $10 million. (At press time, it was still available, although all the works from Craig’s estate had been sold.) With their emphasis on image rather than material and texture, these Celotex canvases are somewhat of an anomaly in Burri’s oeuvre and tend to do the least well at auction, selling for under $50,000. “People expect to see other materials,” explains Sotheby’s Moreni. “Also, some are violent and totally black and difficult to hang in one’s living room.”