Oftentimes art characterized as informal is executed spontaneously and the approach to painting and sculpture are generally gestural, performative, expressionistic and experimental.
Arte Informale is based on the convention of painting while expanding the concept to include time-based themes and viewer dependent trials.
[2] Alberto Burri, Emilio Vedova, and Lucio Fontana are the three main Italian artists to question the limits of painting and sculpture by reassigning the expressive qualities.
[3] Arte Informale became an internationally accepted movement that reached the New York School, the Japanese Gutai Group, and the South American Abstractionists.
[2] As a modernist Burri tried to give shape and rationality to the disorder of post-atomic contemporary culture by extending and exploring the limits of painting.
[2] However, Burri showed this through his work Sacchi by using thrown away burlap sacks and the method of suture that would reference human aspects and the practice of contemporary living.
[4] Burri had been trained as a doctor and worked as a surgeon in the war until he was captured and sent to an American POW camp in Texas, which is where he first started using burlap sacs.
[4] At the time when Arte Informale was starting up in Italy the war had ended, the economy was fluctuating and the U.S Marshall Plan had been put into place.
Through Fontana's Spatial Environment of 1949 he worked to tie together architecture, painting, and sculpture, and had proposed an art form which integrated both reality and ambient space.
Fontana's Spatial Concept of 1951 sought to propose art forms that would complement modern developments in building technology.
The Spatial Concept “engaged the viewer with an opulent vision of radiance that extended into real architectural space beyond the limited and private pictorial plane.” [5] This inclusion of the audience in turn also provided Fontana's environments with performers.
[6] Morlotti along with Emilio Vedova and other artists signed the Manifestio del Realismo in 1946 in Milan stating that the style of Realism is dependent on communication with others as opposed to Naturalism or Abstraction.
At the end of World War II he took an active part in the liberation of Venice and in 1946 he joined the Fronte Nuovo delle Arti, a movement that aimed at reconciling social revolution in artistic expression.
“Their manifesto advocated the refusal of three-dimensional figuration, the use of color to serve a purely expressive purpose, and the use of primitive images, whose significance dates back to the birth of writing systems and symbols”.