In Their Element: Burri, Klein, Calder, Tàpies, and Huyghe

Every work of art is made in collaboration with nature. From minerals ground into pigment and the water that carries gouache across a surface to the air that oxidizes a bronze sculpture, environmental forces have always been party to the creative act. Most artists seek to harness them. Others do something else entirely. They relinquish control — allowing fire to consume, air to move, matter to accumulate, and ecosystems to evolve. In doing so, they shift the terms of authorship itself, ceding it to the forces that govern the material world.

Fire resists control. It ravages, transforms, and exceeds the intentions of those who attempt to contain it. It flares and flickers, burns and blackens, leaving behind ash and smoke. It also makes way for new creation. Alberto Burri began working with fire in the late 1950s. Applying his background in science — he had renounced the medical profession after returning to Italy from an American prisoner-of-war camp in 1946 — Burri began experiments in unconventional materials such as jute, metal, plastic, and tar. Under his blowtorch, surfaces of varying thickness and composition melted and ruptured, transforming pristine skins into perforated, blistered expanses through combustion.

Ironically, despite the volatility of his medium, Burri described his so-called combustioni as “the most controlled and controllable of paintings.” The irony, however, might be the point: symbolic of both birth and death, fire invites paradox.

Yves Klein, another artist who traded the paintbrush for the blowtorch, pushed this dynamic further. Like Burri, he engaged the tension between creation and obliteration, but where Burri sought to direct or control fire, Klein expanded into a broader engagement with the elements, treating fire, air, and water as forces to be experienced rather than mastered. “It is necessary to be like untamed fire,” he wrote, “it is necessary to contradict yourself.”

Made during the final years of his life, Klein’s Fire Paintings (1961–62) register the active presence of flame rather than the burned, residual surfaces seen in Burri’s work. Working on Swedish cardboard coated with magnesium and cadmium-hydrate silicate, he directed bursts of fire across the surface while firemen intervened, dousing the works with water to keep them from burning through. The paintings emerge from this unstable exchange between fire and water, held between ignition and extinction. Klein understood these works as indexes of his action — testaments to the crucible that birthed them.

For Klein, fire was only one expression of a wider elemental field that he sought not to represent, but to inhabit. As early as 1946, Klein described the sky itself as his first artwork, signing his name in the air and claiming this boundless expanse as a field of creation. This immaterial blue would later find form in International Klein Blue (IKB), a color conceived to evoke atmosphere and cosmic energy. In Leap into the Void (1960), he extended this logic into space itself, suspending his body in air and surrendering it to gravity. Here, the elements no longer erupt or burn but engulf; the work unfolds within atmosphere rather than against it.

Air is elusive, beyond sight or grasp, yet it envelops and shapes everything it touches. Like Burri, Alexander Calder’s background in science — in his case, mechanical engineering — led him to embrace nature as a creative partner. Where Klein treated air as atmosphere and immaterial space, Calder activated it. His interest in gravity and flight manifested early in Cirque Calder (1926–31), a miniature big top populated by trapeze artists and tightrope walkers, figures who, like Calder himself, rely on air as their primary medium.

Developed in the early 1930s, his kinetic sculptures, which Marcel Duchamp — who likewise explored air’s evasive properties in 50 cc of Paris Air (1919) — dubbed “mobiles,” were originally motorized. By the 1940s, Calder abandoned these mechanisms and surrendered his art to the currents of air. Composed of colored sheets of aluminum and steel suspended from carefully calibrated lengths of wire, the mobiles become dynamic, ever-shifting works that depend on the whims of nature to fully activate. To watch one gently move is to attune to invisible currents that are central to our weather systems, forces themselves affected by changes in atmospheric temperature. As our climate shifts, so will the movement of Calder’s mobiles.

While fire and air feel immaterial — force more than substance — earth introduces weight and resistance. It is literal and palpable, the foundation that physically supports and sustains life. Bringing chalk, marble, and sand into painting, the Catalan artist and theorist Antoni Tàpies grounded the elemental logic explored by Burri, Klein, and Calder in matter itself. Like Burri’s scorched plastics and burlap, Tàpies’s surfaces treat material not as support but as subject, allowing sand, dust, and pigment to assert their own physical presence. Their physicality would find resonance in art historian Leo Steinberg’s 1972 argument that, around 1950, the painted surface “no longer simulate[d] vertical fields, but opaque flatbed horizontals.” Abandoning illusionism, Tàpies embraced materiality in its stead.

Tàpies’s 1959 Marro sobre negre (Brown on Black), in the collection of New York’s Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, features lines incised into a plane of sandy matter, like a hopscotch grid scratched into dirt. In the late-career painting Mà sobre Terra (Hand on Earth, 2000), a coating of earth is displaced by the imprint of a giant hand. Rather than depicting terrain from the vantage of a disembodied eye, as in traditional landscape painting, the work enacts physical contact between body and earth, linking human and environment, nature and culture.

As the elemental logic explored by Burri, Klein, Calder, and Tàpies moves from fire and air to matter itself, it culminates in systems that evolve beyond any single author. With nature as coauthor, Pierre Huyghe’s practice sets ecosystems into motion. His aquarium series, begun in 2009, comprises aquatic environments that house both animal and vegetal organisms. Like Calder’s mobiles, once the artist’s work on these sculptures is complete, independent forces assert their dominance over creative intention. In 2015, he placed one such tank on the roof of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, its top open to the elements. Inside, American brook lampreys and tadpole shrimp — species that, according to the geological record, have remained unchanged for millions of years — shared space with a rock that appeared to float, defying gravity. Satellite (2025), his newest and largest aquarium installation, juxtaposes ancient fossils with fluorescent, biologically engineered GloFish, the genetic code for which was patented in the 20th century.

Working decades later, Huyghe extends a genealogy of relinquishing authorial control into the context of living systems. As in their works, Huyghe’s aquariums are not shaped by a single force, but by the interaction of many: biological growth, sedimentation, light, water, and time. The artist sets the conditions, then steps back. The work evolves, adapts, and transforms on its own terms, shifting the logic of the artist’s engagement with nature from one of collaboration to one of dependence.