Exhibition
THE UNSEEN. From Informalist painting to the postwar photobook (1945-1965)
26 Feb 2016 – 5 Jun 2016
Address
- Castelló 77
- Madrid
Community of Madrid - 28006
- Spain
Following World War II, both Europe and the world saw the rise of a type of painting that was extremely different to the interwar one.
About
Cubism, the Expressionist movements and Surrealism were followed by a painting that specifically questioned its "form" in pictorial terms and in a notably radical manner. This "other" art, known since that time as "Informalism", found its spokesman in 1952 with the French critic Michel Tapié in his book Un art autre [Art of another kind], which had a subtitle, Où il s'agit de nouveaux dévidages du reel [When dealing with new unwindings of the real] that already expressed the author's intention to focus on the new forms, the new dévidages [unwindings] that had happened to reality. Postwar painting throughout Europe had certainly started to make use of "other" materials of a humble type and ones quite different to the noble and conventional ones of painting, such as sand, gesso, cardboard, pieces of paper, sackcloth, rags and cloth and a wide range of rubbish and cast-off material. Artists combined them, fragmented them, destroyed them or used them to construct surfaces and masses on the canvas – in some cases extremely dense ones – of unconventional materials with an unformed or deformed appearance, which were also worked in new ways: with the hands, with spatulas and palette knives; smearing them, sewing them, tearing, sticking and unsticking them, applying them in patches or painting with them. The gestures of painting thus changed as much as its materials and supports, given that its subject had now become painting itself and its forms, or its distortions.