Gallery 306. Gesture and Action
After the devastating impact of World War II, many artists and intellectuals felt the need to begin anew. The aspiration to radically break with the establishment, which had existed since the start of modernism, gained new urgency. Jean-Paul Sartre’s existentialism— humans are defined by their actions—permeated the postwar cultural scene in Europe and the USA, contributing to the emergence of a kind of art focused on subjectivity, action, and gesture, as exemplified here by Lucio Fontana, Helen Frankenthaler, Yves Klein, and Antoni Tàpies.
Fontana slashed and punctured his canvases to transcend the twodimensional plane and introduce the infinite into painting, while Antoni Tàpies ripped, scratched, and tore his canvases brimming with matter, transforming the pictorial surface into a battered wall that evoked the passage of time, fragility, and memory. In his Anthropometries and Fire Paintings, Klein approached artistic creation as a performative ritual where the body and elements of nature become direct instruments, turning both the process and the outcome into art. Frankenthaler, in turn, poured diluted paint onto canvases on the floor, focusing her interest on the intuitive manipulation of color.
The gesturality and randomness in the works of Klein and Frankenthaler also appear in the work of Henri Michaux, although in his case from a more introspective, psychological perspective. Michaux’s phantasmagorical figures are not mere visual representations but manifestations of a process of exploring the unconscious through gesture.
This same expressive freedom and interest in chance is palpable in artists from later generation, such as Cy Twombly, who allowed his hand to move freely over the surface of the canvas in an automated gesture encompassing writing, scribbling, and abstract signs. Likewise, every line and blotch in Martha Jungwirth’s paintings emerges from the interaction between intention and spontaneity, where color and matter unpredictably determine the end result.