Karel Appel (1921 - 2006)

Karel Appel was born in Amsterdam, the Netherland (1921). From 1940 to 1943, Karel Appel studied at the Rijksacademie voor Beeldende Kunsten, or Royal Academy of Art, in Amsterdam. Together with Pierre Alechinsky and Corneille, he was a co-founder of Cobra (1948-195o), a group of Danish, Belgian, and Dutch artists who were inspired by the Art Brut of Jean Dubuffet.

Like Dubuffet, they employed banal subject matter, subconscious imagery, and a purposely naive, grotesque figuration. The group also adopted elements from folk and primitive art, and despite their Abstract Expressionist tendency, they never ruled out the validity of objective depiction. In brief, the Cobra artists attempted to combine the rational with the irrational, abstraction and figuration in their work.

Among them, Appel was perhaps the most persistent in his search for a pure painting, employing an impulsive, gestural approach in which the workings of the subconscious imagination could flow spontaneously into the process of pain painterly improvisation.

Exhibitions

Appel had his first show in Groningen in 1946. In 1949 he participated with the other Cobra artists in the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam. In 1947 he started sculpting with all kinds of used materials (in the technique of assemblage) and painted them in bright colors: white, red, yellow, blue, and black. His first American gallery exhibition took place in 1954 at the Martha Jackson Gallery. The following year his painting Child and Beast II (1951) was included in the influential exhibition, The New Decade at the Museum of Modern Art which featured the work of twenty-two European painters and sculptors including newcomers like Francis Bacon, Jean Dubuffet, and Pierre Soulages.

After 1990 he became much more popular in the Netherlands; he had several big shows in Amsterdam and Bruxelles, organized by director Rudy Fuchs. Also, the CoBrA-museum in Amstelveen organized several shows featuring his work. He became the most famous Dutch CoBrA artist.

GALLERY PAGE OF ARTIST