Neo-expressionism

Neo-Expressionism is an international phenomenon of a powerful revival of painting in an expressionist spirit in the 1980s, which arose as a reaction against the dominance of Minimalism and Conceptual art in the preceding decade. Neo-Expressionists returned to the large-format, emotionally charged, figurative canvas with dense texture, energetic and sometimes deliberately crude brushwork, saturated colour and tense, dramatic imagery drawn from history, myth, national trauma and personal experience. The movement unfolded in parallel in several countries. In Germany it was embodied by the so-called 'Neue Wilden', including Georg Baselitz, Anselm Kiefer, who reflected on the burden of national history, and Jörg Immendorff. In Italy the parallel tendency of the Transavanguardia developed with Francesco Clemente and Enzo Cucchi. In the United States Neo-Expressionism includes Jean-Michel Basquiat and Julian Schnabel. The movement restored painting to a central place on the art scene and market, though critics charged it with excessive theatricality and commercialisation. Neo-Expressionism remains an emblematic example of the cyclical return to painting and expressive figuration in the age of late Modernism and early Postmodernism.