Czech Informel

Czech Informel is described as a current of expressive structural abstraction that emerged from specific local conditions at the turn of the 1950s and 1960s. It radically defined itself against all contemporary production and compromised creation and aestheticization of official art and became a turning point in the history of Czech art. Foreign critics appreciated the uniqueness of the works and wrote about a strong revolt of about thirty desperate avant-garde artists, which had no predecessor in Czechoslovakia. The term "informel" was used from 1945 by the French critic Waldemar-George and taken up and claimed by the painter Michel Tapié in the very title of the exhibition Signifiants de l´informel staged in Paul Facchetti´s studio in 1951. With international informel, which in Enrico Crispolti's conception includes a very heterogeneous group of artistic forms ranging from tachism to lyrical abstraction, is the Czech informel related only by some creative techniques.