In the postwar Brazil of the late 1940s, informal abstractionism emerged as an important tendency that established itself more firmly during the 1950s. This period was defined by the creation of several museums of modern art, as part of a process of institutionalising the field and internationalising art. Artists who migrated to Brazil due to the political turmoil at the start of the century arrived in the country at the same time that some Brazilian artists moved to Europe and followed the debates on abstraction and its various strands.
In this experimental context, the canvas came to be understood as a field for the examination of visual languages. Its surface became a space for action, marked by the explosion of gesture, rhythms, tensions and above all by an appreciation for the pictorial process itself. Figurative references were broken down, forms dissolved and colours gained autonomy, in a movement of rupture and abandonment of the traditional principles of figurative painting that preceded it.
In this way, artists who previously worked figuratively shifted their research to informal abstraction. While some of them maintained certain figurative codes and elements of objective reality, others definitively broke with representation, focusing on matter, colour and gesture.
In a collective assessment of Brazilian art from this period it is still possible to identify two major strands. One of them is a lyrical and subjective tendency, focused on inner experience. The other consists of works that prioritise formal investigations, exploring the relationships between surface, rhythm, composition and matter, without necessarily adhering to the geometric rigour of concrete abstraction.