CategoriesStyles and Movements
Gestural Abstraction
Abstract painting in which the visible trace of the artist's movement, in sweeping, dripped or slashed paint, becomes the subject.
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About
In gestural abstraction the brushstroke, drip or smear records the speed, pressure and rhythm of the body that made it. The idea has older roots in East Asian ink painting and in Surrealist automatic drawing, but it took decisive form after the Second World War in the United States, Europe and Japan.
In New York, Jackson Pollock laid canvases on the floor and poured and flung paint across them, as in Autumn Rhythm (Number 30) (1950), while Willem de Kooning attacked his Woman paintings of the early 1950s with slashing strokes; the critic Harold Rosenberg called this action painting. In Paris, Hans Hartung and Georges Mathieu made fast, calligraphic marks associated with Art Informel, and in Germany Bernard Schultze built tangled, encrusted surfaces. Near Osaka, the Gutai artist Kazuo Shiraga hung from a rope and painted with his feet. Look for overlapping strokes, splashes and the direction of each mark.
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