Born of Informalismo: Marta Minujín and the Nascent Body of Performance

Informalist painting emerged in the late 1940s as a form of expressive abstraction characterized by the gestural application of paint. By 1956, it had firmly taken hold in Buenos Aires, where the move­ment’s proponents produced relief­-like paintings that incorporated a somber color palette and the extra-­artistic ma­terials of everyday life, from rags to rusted cans. Published on the occasion of the exhibition Born of Informalismo: Marta Minujín and the Nascent Body of Performance, this booklet reconsiders the movement’s heterogeneity, transnational context, and sociopolitical framework through the Argentine artist Marta Minujín’s early Informalist paintings and sculptures. In an in­-depth essay, art historian Michaëla de Lacaze Mohrmann examines how this movement set the stage for Minujín’s trailblazing practice and served as a key conduit for Argentine experimental art in the 1960s.