Informalism and The Aesthetics of Underdevelopment: Colombian Abstract Painting in the Cold War

Abstract Informalism emerged in Colombia in the early 1960s as an alternative artistic language and a means of resisting the prevailing artistic status quo. Through the use of everyday materials in highly gestural and textured abstract paintings, artists such as Álvaro Herrán, Miguel Ángel Cárdenas, Leonel Estrada, and Guillermo Wiedemann questioned the very nature of painting and the aesthetic values traditionally associated with it. Their aesthetic approach, however, reached beyond artistic spheres. Reflecting the realities of poverty, chaos, and “underdevelopment,” Informalist abstraction subverted and rejected notions of modernity and modernization that were central to the dominant political ideologies of Colombia at the time. Through a close examination of works by Herrán, Cárdenas, Wiedemann, and Estrada, this article seeks to situate Colombian Informalism within broader narratives of postwar abstraction to help decenter and decolonize existing art historical narratives by demonstrating the diversity and flexibility of modernist languages in response to local conditions and site-specific realities. The article argues that Informalist painting in Colombia revealed the stark realities of poverty and the growing inequalities faced by Colombian society by mirroring the construction techniques and materials of urban settlements improvised by rural migrants upon arriving in major cities—what is often referred to as “informal architecture.”