Art movements and styles

Post-war American abstraction, with which New York replaced Paris as the centre of the art world after 1945. It is among the strongest and most expensive segments of the art market.

Abstraction is an artistic approach that gives up the faithful depiction of reality and lets colour, shape, line and rhythm speak for themselves. The name comes from the Latin abstractus, meaning drawn away, and since the beginning of the twentieth century it has changed what we expect of a picture.

Art brut is art made outside institutions and the academic frame, often by artists with mental illness (art brut, “raw art”). The term was coined by Jean Dubuffet; in the Czech context it includes Anna Zemánková, and interest in it on the market is growing.

Art Deco is the decorative, elegant style of the 1920s and 1930s, joining geometry to luxurious materials, and it still feels refined and timeless today.

Conceptual art rests on the idea, not on how a work looks. An artwork can therefore be a text on a wall, a performance, instructions in an envelope, or simply an idea you hold in your head.

Contemporary art reflects the issues of the day and is defined not by style but by time and approach. It is the most dynamic and most alive floor of the entire art market.

Cubism is a movement in painting and sculpture that breaks reality down into geometric shapes and several viewpoints at once. The name comes from the French word cube.

Digital art is made with the help of digital technologies, software or algorithms, and today ranges from digital graphics to works based on data and artificial intelligence. In a few decades it has gone from a marginal experiment to a full part of the gallery and auction scene.

Expressionism is a movement devoted to the expression of emotion, inner states and subjective experience. Instead of a faithful image of the world it offers an image of the soul, often with colour sharp as a nerve and line stretched to breaking point.

Fauvism is a painting movement of the early twentieth century famed for its explosive colour and loosened form. It freed colour from reality and let it sing purely for joy, energy and strong feeling.

Hyperrealism is painting so faithful to reality that at first glance you could easily mistake it for a photograph. Demand for it tends to fluctuate; in the Czech Republic it is represented by Jan Mikulka, among others.

Impressionism is a painting movement of the last quarter of the nineteenth century that chased light, the moment and atmosphere rather than detail. Once derided, it is now among the most expensive and best-loved chapters in the history of art.

Informel is post-war structural abstraction built on matter, material and chance, and in Czechoslovakia it became the principal unofficial artistic tendency.

Kawaii is the aesthetics of cuteness — childlike, endearing characters — and is especially strong in Asian and contemporary art. It rests on the idea that the pleasing and playful can also be profound.

Kitsch art is a category that knowingly balances between kitsch and high art, turning a banal, pleasing motif into a collectable object. It plays with where kitsch actually ends and art begins.

Minimalism sets emotion and storytelling aside and concentrates on the essence of objects themselves: their shape, colour, material and the space they occupy. It is art that says less so that the essential can come through.

Modern art covers roughly the period from the 1860s to the 1960s — the time when artists consciously turned away from academic rules and began looking for entirely new forms. It should not be confused with contemporary art, which is being made only now.

Op art (optical art) is a movement that plays with the eye through geometry and sharp contrast, so that a surface appears to ripple and move even though it is entirely still.

Orphic cubism is the term Guillaume Apollinaire gave to the colourful, musically inclined branch of cubism (orphism). In František Kupka's work around the exhibition of 1912 it became a herald of pure abstraction.

Performance is a live event bounded in time and space in which the artist's own body is the primary medium. It happens here and now, once and for all, and its magic lies precisely in that transience.

A movement of the 1960s that takes consumerism, advertising, comics and celebrity as its subject. Led by Andy Warhol, it became one of the most sought-after segments of the art market.

Post-war art is the work made roughly from 1945 to the 1960s, responding to the war just lived through, to a divided world and to the rise of consumerism. For collectors it is an appealing band between the classics and the present.

An ordinary object raised to the status of an artwork, a principle introduced by Marcel Duchamp. It opened the door to conceptual art, minimalism and pop art.

Socially engaged art is work whose material is not paint or stone but working with people, a community and a social theme. Here the work is the encounter itself and whatever arises between people.

Suprematism is Kazimir Malevich's purely geometric abstraction, which refuses to imitate reality and seeks a pure form made only of simple shapes and fields of colour.

A movement that opens the door to dreams, the unconscious and the irrational, drawing on Freud's ideas. It arose in the 1920s around André Breton's manifesto and remains one of the most sought-after chapters of modern art among collectors.