Karel Appel (1921-2006)
Karel Appel is one of the most prominent figures of his generation in international and Dutch painting. Over nearly sixty years, he built up a strikingly expressive, larger-than-life oeuvre of paintings and sculptures. With such a large oeuvre it should come as no surprise that themes and shapes from earlier phases recur in his body of work. Appel painted innumerable landscapes, nudes and animals.
After the Second World War, the CoBrA* movement, in which Appel was active, sought a radical new art form, and found it in spontaneous creativity and experiment. The rawness of Appel's work in this early period never left him, nor did his penchant for pastels and classic subjects. His great strength was that he never stopped experimenting, and remained true to his unorthodox approach to paint and materials for his sculptures. An independent spirit to the last, Appel was a true independent and always captured the capricious nature of life. He unerringly delved the world and the depths of human emotion time and again. Each of the several workshops in which he worked until a very advanced age (in New York, Tuscany, Monaco and the Netherlands) was a continuing source of inspiration to the artist. Karel Appel died at age 85.
* CoBrA was an art movement founded in 1948 by the artists Constant, Corneille, Christian Dotremont and Asger Jorn. This 'young guard' found inspiration in untraditional sources like non-Western art and children's drawings.
