Informalism is one of the most significant movements in Catalonia during the second half of the 20th century, due to what it represented in terms of creative freedom and a break with representational constraints.
As a tendency, it emerged in Europe after the Second World War and was defined through concepts such as art autre or art informel, coined by the French art critic Michel Tapié in 1951, to advocate for a “different art”. An art that renounced compositional organisation and any form of rational elaboration, and that embraced works that did not represent anything, but instead constituted plastic manifestations with their own intrinsic value. Always personal and introspective, Informalism unfolded into a wide range of pictorial varieties—matter painting, tachisme, sign-gesture and spatialism—that dominated the European, and Catalan, art scene throughout the 1950s and 1960s.
The exhibition “Another Art. Informalism in Catalonia, 1956–1966” presents the most extensive review carried out to date of this movement in our country and includes artists—especially women—who have been less exhibited or recognised within the broader Catalan informalist context. At the same time, it dedicates a space to the historian and critic Juan-Eduardo Cirlot (Barcelona, 1916–1973), one of the movement’s most fervent advocates. It also pays special tribute to the artists Albert Ràfols-Casamada, Romà Vallès, Evarist Vallès and Antoni Tàpies, whose centenary is being commemorated this year.
The selection of period documentation makes it possible to introduce new perspectives and to contextualise the works within their historical framework.
Ultimately, the exhibition seeks to vindicate an entire generation of undeniable historical significance, in order to restore it to its rightful place within the historiography of contemporary Catalan art.
