At the end of the fifties, art-critics came up with this term, to satisfy a need to describe the non-gestural input abstract style painting. After having gone through some terminological adjustments... ''HARD-EDGE'' now refers to a preconceived pictorial technique, dividing the painting's surface in coloured planes with sharply defined geometrical contours, having no colour transition between one and the other.
An initiator in that field is the American Artist Ellsworth Kelly, who creates in 1949/50 an artistic abstraction, based on a serial repetition of graphic elements painted in full, clear, solid tones, uniformly delimited and distributed on the canvas. From then on, ''HARD-EDGE'' came into being and was very rapidly adopted by the greatest modern-art painters such as: Lichtenstein, Tousignant, Molinari and… last but not least, Roger Katch.
The use of ''HARD-EDGE'' as a technique during the sixties and seventies, can also be seen in most of the contemporary works executed in POP'ART style, with a tremendous influence on graphics, where purity and precision in die-cutting of geometrical shapes are mandatory. Bringing together this technique to that style, favours large format creative expression artworks, which interestingly enough, are also found in Modern, High-Tech and Neo-Classical Architecture.