The history of the Galleria d'Arte Moderna di Bologna is full of exhibitions and events dealing with Italian abstract and informal art.
The section starts with works by Tancredi, Carla Accardi, Pietro Consagra, all belonging to the Forma group and striving for the affirmation of self-determined values in art, as stated in their 1947 Manifesto: “In art there is but the traditional and inventive reality of pure form”.

Besides important works by Gastone Novelli, Fausto Melotti and Toti Scialoja, the exhibition path moreover features those artists involved with Bologna’s Cronache gallery (Aldo Borgonzoni, Ilario Rossi, Carlo Corsi). Francesco Arcangeli, GAM’s long-standing director, remarked how their common experience was what eventually generated those elements of specific difference granting their “inclusion” in the definition of Ultimo Naturalismo (Last Naturalism, involving among its protagonists artists such as Pompilio Mandelli, Mattia Moreni and Ennio Morlotti).

In 1983 Bologna hosted the Informale in Italia (Informal in Italy) exhibition, curated by Renato Barilli and Franco Solmi, a wide survey of such tendency’s foremost representatives: Alberto Burri, Giulio Turcato, Leoncillo, and many more. Such authors are here displayed with an emphasis on their relation to other artists (from Galizio to Pozzati, from Sartelli to Uncini) who have investigated innovative practices and experimentations – both in technique as well as in materials – thus opening important paths for Italian art in the late Sixties.