informalism

Informalism, also known as Art Informel, is a term used to describe a broad postwar movement in European painting that emphasizes gesture, texture, and materiality over formal structure. Emerging in the late 1940s and gaining prominence in the 1950s, it arose as a reaction against traditional composition and geometric abstraction. The label covers a range of tendencies, including the French Tachisme, and a general openness to improvised, nonrepresentational handling of paint and materials.

In informalist works, the process of making is central. Artists favor spontaneous, expressive mark-making, irregular surfaces, and the built-up texture of paint, often combining nontraditional materials such as ash, sand, burlap, or tar. Forms tend to be abstract or only loosely suggestive of recognizable subjects, with emphasis on the act of painting, chance, and sensory effect rather than precise depiction.

Key figures associated with informalism include Wols (Wolfgang H.), Hans Hartung, Jean Fautrier, Georges Mathieu, Emilio Vedova, Alberto Burri, and Pierre Soulages. Their practices encompass gestural painting, sgraffito-like layering, and, in Burri’s case, object-based works using sacks and other materials. The movement is linked to broader European responses to war-time rupture and to parallel developments in Abstract Expressionism, while retaining distinct emphasis on surface, materiality, and an anti-formalist attitude toward representation.

Legacy and interpretation vary among critics. Informalism contributed to the diversification of postwar abstraction and influenced later currents such as lyrical abstraction. Because the term aggregates diverse practices across countries, it remains a contested label, applied more as a broad descriptor than as a precise stylistic category.