Burri was a physician in the Italian army until he was captured and interned in a prisoner-of-war camp in Texas. It is there that he began drawing. From the late 1940s, he started to work with burlap sacking which he ripped, stained and burned, stitching bits of canvas onto it, and encrusting the surface with paint, tar, pumice, plaster and metal. He also cut into the picture surface. In Lo Strappo (The Rip), Burri takes a dirty bedsheet or tablecloth and stitches it up the middle, adding tabs at the ends. Burri always rejected the metaphor, but this wounding of the surface has often been taken to symbolise wartime suffering and the stitching to relate to his work as a physician. Burri’s close friend, the artist Lucio Fontana, owned another version of Lo Strappo.