Antonio Corpora

Antonio Corpora was born in Tunis on 15 August 1909. There he attended an art academy and studied under Armand Vergeaud until he went to Florence in 1930 to copy Old Master paintings. In 1931 Corpora settled in Paris, where he met Alberto Giacometti and Sergio Signori. Antonio Corpora often returned to Italy and Tunisia, where he co-founded the "Les quatres" group in 1934.
Good contacts to well-known Italian artists, including the group associated with the Galleria del Milione in Milan, enabled him to publish some of his writings. In the 1930s Corpora painted in an abstract style notable for geometric forms and strips of colour.
Late in the 1930s he briefly held a chair in stage design in Bologna but left Italy during the second world war to live in Tunis. On returning to Italy in 1945, Antonio Corpora joined forces with Guttuso, Fazzini et al to found the "Neo-cubista" group. The pictures he produced at that time were under the sway of Braque and Matisse.
In 1947 Corpora became a member of the "Fronte Nuovo delle Arti", which was notable for its social commitment. Late in the 1940s he began to reject Cubist formulae, adopting instead a freer formal idiom that by the 1950s had become Abstract Expressionism.
The work Corpora did in the 1960s can be classified as Informel yet he did not abandon geometric forms entirely until the early 1970s. From 1975 Antonio Corpora worked with a dripping technique on canvases roughened with plaster of Paris and sand, which he coated with vibrant colour. In the 1990s he continued to experiment but ultimately returned to compositions with strips of colour.
Antonio Corpora showed work four times at the Venice Biennale between 1948 and 1956 at the Venice Biennale, and, in 1968, at the Rome Biennale, winning prizes at both. The president of Italy presented him with an award in 2003 and he was made a member of the San Luca Academy.
Antonio Corpora died in Rome on 6 September 2004.(antonio-corpora.com)

Lyrical informal abstractionism Lilia Carrillo

Lilia Carrillo (1930–1974) was a Mexican painter from the Generación de la Ruptura, which broke with the Mexican School of Painting of the early 20th century. She was trained in the traditional style but her work began to evolve away from it after studying in Paris in the 1950s. While she and husband abstract artist Manuel Felguérez struggled to get their work accepted, even selling Mexican handcrafts and folk art to survive, she eventually had her canvas work exhibited large venues in Mexico City and various cities in the world. Her work was part of the inaugural exhibition of the Museo de Arte Moderno in Mexico City in 1964. After her death in 1974, her work received honors from the Palacio de Bellas Artes and has been exhibited in various venues.

 Encouraged by Juan Soriano to explore other kinds of painting, in 1953, she received a scholarship to study in Paris, moving their with her new husband Ricardo Guerra. She enrolled in the Académie de la Grande Chaumière, learning about avant-garde movements such as Cubism, Surrealism, Expressionism and various forms of abstract art. However, she guarded about these movements at first.
She returned to Mexico in 1956 after separating from Guerra In 1960, she married Mexican abstract artist Manuel Felguérez in Washington, DC.Both were of the new Generación de la Ruptura artist movement, which had trouble selling paintings in established venues. Carrillo and Felguérez turned to Mexican handcrafts and folk art to make money to survive. Carrillo had two children to support as well, prompting her to take on a Czechoslovakian persona of “Felisa Gross” to produce purely for commercial purposes.In 1962, she traveled to Peru with Felguérez to exhibit her work at the Instituto de Arte Contemporáneo. On this occasion, she met Peruvian vanguard artists such as Fernando de Szyszlo.

 While Carrillo was studying at La Esmeralda, she rejected abstract art, with her work heavily influenced by the dominant Mexican School of painting. Her very early work is figurative such as her self-portrait from 1950.After she graduated Juan Soriano encouraged her to explore other artistic trends and she went to Paris. There Here she became to experiment with Cubism, influenced by Matisse, Modigliani and Picasso, and the Cubism, Surrealism, Expressionism and abstract art movements in general. When she returned to Mexico in the mid-1950s, her work was already showing influence from abstract art.
In the 1950s she became an adherent of automatism, a theory introduced to Mexico by Austrian painter Wolfgang Paalen. It is based on Surrealism and posits that the artist’s hand should be guided by its own movement in order to tap the subconscious. She then moved onto her own abstract style which has been classified as “lyrical informal abstractionism” or “informal expressionism.” She never rejected the labels but always insisted that she did not have a real method for creating her works, or if she did, it changed often. Wikipedia