Contribution of Female Artists to Informalist Abstraction

Abstract

This paper explores the appearance of Art Informel in Croatia through the perspective of gender theories in order to identify the reasons why the presence of female artists was very small, practically negligible within Informalist abstraction. The art of high modernism, both globally and in Croatia, is predominantly seen as “masculine” art. A very small number of women in this region were engaged in abstract art at the time of the appearance of Art Informel, and an even smaller number were inclined to the more radical Materic research and the destruction of form. For this reason, the corpus of works by Croatian female artists engaged in Informalist poetics is rather limited. This research seeks to (re)valuate the contribution of female artists to the Croatian Art Informel during the late 1950s and early 1960s. Besides Biserka Baretić, one of the few renowned and acknowledged Croatian painters of Informalist orientation, Mila Kumbatović stands out with her structural paintings, and this paper also analyses two almost unknown Informalist works by the Vinkovci-based painter Đurđena Zaluški Haramija from 1961, as well as the experimental works of sculptor Vera Fischer created in the period from 1958 to 1960.