The exhibition Another art. Informalism in Catalonia 1956-1966 , organized by the Museu d’Art de Girona and curated by Joan Gil Gregorio and Conxita Oliver, highlights the value and expressive power of Catalan pictorial production between the fifties and sixties. A period that was especially fruitful for artists who worked in abstraction, many of whom (Tàpies, Cuixart, Ràfols-Casamada, Hernández Pijuan or August Puig) had enormous international success, unexpectedly supported by Francoist institutions that, after the post-war period, struggled to reincorporate the Spanish state into the cultural and political life of the Western world.
Inaugurated in October of last year, and extended until the summer of 2024, the exhibition happily coincides with the commemoration of the birth anniversaries of four of the artists present, Antoni Tàpies, Albert Ràfols Casamada, Evarist Vallès and Romà Vallès. The show includes the work of around forty painters, and painters, among whom, in addition to those already mentioned, include names of the stature of Eduard Alcoy, Josep Hurtuna, Joaquim Llucià, Norman Narotzky, Elena Paredes, Maria Assumpció Raventós, Amèlia Riera and Joan-Josep Tharrats, among others. Artists who worked from different technical and conceptual procedures (material painting, tachisme, gesturalism, spatialism) but always linked to abstraction and the formalist rupture that this “art autre” sought, according to the fortunate expression of the French critic Michel Tapié. An art without figurative reference, worked with textures and often austere chromatic ranges, emotionally intense, sometimes rude, which capitalized on European pictorial practice of the mid-20th century, in parallel with the North American triumph of abstract expressionism.
The exhibition catalogue, which we present here, is almost an artist’s book due to its attractive visual consistency and graphic treatment inspired by the period it deals with. It offers the reader a careful study of this period, which the curators know in depth and which they have managed to explain and transmit with academic rigor and didactic clarity. It also incorporates two complementary studies signed by specialists Lourdes Cirlot and Àlex Mitrani, which place Catalan informalism in an international context, or locate perhaps marginal, but also very interesting figures. In addition to the reproduction and presentation of the works on display, the catalogue also includes a complete chronology of the period, the biographies and exhibition histories of the artists, and a very wide repertoire of documents, largely unpublished, which greatly enrich the reading and knowledge of this central period of informalist art in 20th-century Catalonia.
Joan Duran-Porta
Responsible for md’A publications
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The catalogue can be purchased at the Museu d’Art shop and also online at the Generalitat de Catalunya bookstore.
