Opera Gallery Paris wanted to kick off this new season with an exhibition that is steeped in history. The works curated for the exhibition Informed – Art Informel and the Contemporary Structure all demonstrate the incredible pictorial variety that existed in the wake of the Second World War and the numerous echoes that still resonate today in contemporary art.

Imagined as the expression of a more humanistic, spiritual quest that began simultaneously in Europe and the United States after World War II, the concept of Informalism refers to the unformed or shapeless ; it’s most often related to a spontaneous gesture or new technique rather than to any preconceived idea. The term, coined in 1952 by art critic Michel Tapié in an essay entitled Un Art Autre (‘Art of Another Kind’), quickly became popular as a style that embraced the subjective and expressive, refusing the intellectual and geometric compositions found in Cubism and Abstract Art. Works expressing this ideal sprouted up all over France, Germany, Italy, Japan and Spain, especially in movements such as Abstraction Lyrique (Action Painting), Abstract Expressionism, ZERO, CoBrA, Gutaï and Tachism.

Each of these groups represented a different geographic take on the same widespread feeling of horror at the absurdity and violence experienced during the war. The originators of Informalism all sought to prove, through their art, that experience outweighs knowledge in a world that is being constantly reinvented.

Art Informel was and remains an alternative of thinking, a bounty of unsaddled creativity that rejects a manichean vision defining itself in terms of abstract or figurative art.