Is Informel the New Zero?

At last, one might say, the slumber of Informel, the hitherto most underestimated direction of postwar art, is over. The paintings of Hans Hartung, Karl Otto Götz, and Martha Jungwirth now hang in prominent places in the booths of major European fairs. Informel art, which consists primarily of gesture, color, and structure, is being rediscovered. Some insiders already see a new wave rushing in, as stimulating as that of Zero art a good ten years ago. Will Informel really be the new Zero?

Yet the situation is a little different this time. The prices of the first avant-garde German works have been rising slowly but surely for years. Without sensationalism, without speculative tones, without irascible outliers. There’s no new rocket being ignited on the market, launching vertically into the sky.

The Ströhrer Collection of Informel art in Duisburg’s Küppersmühle Museum , whose extension blends harmoniously into its surroundings due to the façade of GIMA clinker bricks, stems from of a mature canon that dealers like Galerie Schlichtenmaier have been promoting for decades. And not the beginnings.

What makes Informel painting so appealing to us is its blend of energy and contemplation, which touches the deep longings of the twenty-first century. Incidentally, this also applies to the works of the postwar artists Fritz Winter or Ernst Wilhelm Nay, who worked abstractly but not in the Informel vein.

A new understanding of the universality of their visual language is spreading, among other things, because a whole series of young contemporary artists is bringing the gestural into today’s art as a matter of course, as if it were always present.