Arte Informale

Arte informale is the Italian face of the postwar turn against rational abstraction. Named by the critic Michel Tapié in 1950 and parallel to tachisme and Abstract Expressionism, it privileged the artist's expressive impulse over premeditated form: gesture, matter, and sign became the basis of communication, and painting was approached as a spontaneous, experimental act. In Italy the movement took a strongly material turn - Burri's burnt and sewn sacking, Fontana's punctured canvases, Vedova's violent black-and-white cycles - while sharing the era's distrust of geometric purity. Italian critics later tied it to a broader European 'art of another kind', and its emphasis on raw matter fed directly into the experiments of Arte Povera a decade later.

Defining characteristics

• Spontaneous gesture: drips, smears, and rapid brushwork left visible
• Matter as subject: burlap, tar, ash, and burnt or stitched surfaces
• Damaged picture planes: punctured, slashed, or torn canvases
• Anti-geometric composition with open, unresolved fields
• Emotional intensity over measured structure

Key figures

• Lucio Fontana (1899-1968) — Spatialist whose punctured and slashed canvases redefined the picture plane
• Alberto Burri (1915-1995) — Former physician whose sacchi made decayed matter the medium
• Emilio Vedova (1919-2006) — Painter of aggressive, gestural black-and-white cycles

Example works

• Concetto spaziale (Spatial Concept) series — Lucio Fontana (from 1949)
• Sacchi (Sacks) series — Alberto Burri (from 1950)

Sources

• Arte Informale - Wikipedia encyclopedia

← Back to the catalog