Karel Appel

KAREL APPEL (Netherlands, 1921 - Switzerland, 2006).
"Heads Like Clouds".1971.
Color lithograph.
Edition of 100 copies.
Hand signed and dated.
Measurements: 69 x 104 cm.

The lithograph "Heads Like Clouds" presents an explosion of color and gestural energy. On the plane of the paper, Appel organizes a composition where rounded, undulating and dynamic forms (suggestive of faces or heads) seem to float in an indefinite space, almost as if they were emerging or dissolving in a pictorial atmosphere.

In 1971, when he made this lithograph, Karel Appel was already an internationally recognized artist. He had been one of the founders of the CoBrA movement (1948-1951), which advocated a spontaneous, childlike, irrational and vitalistic painting, in opposition to the rigidity of academicism and the rationalism of post-war geometric abstraction.

Karel Appel was a painter, sculptor and graphic artist, and is currently considered the most vigorous artist of the post-war generation in his country. In 1948 he founded, together with Corneille, Jorn and Alechinsku, the CoBrA International Group, which was decisive in the development and expansion of European automatism between the 1940s and 1950s. During the Nazi occupation of Holland, Apple wandered around the country to avoid being sent to work in Germany. In 1946 he had his first solo exhibition in Groningen, in which the imprint of Dubuffet, with whom he would come to share certain theoretical concepts, was already visible. His first sculptures, pioneering in the assembly of waste materials, date from 1947. Some artists, rejecting the rigor and sectarianism of the surrealist organization, founded the CoBrA group (abbreviations for Copenhagen, Brussels and Amsterdam, cities from which Appel, Corneille and Constant, who signed the inaugural manifesto together with Jorn, Noiret and Dotremont, came from). The CoBrA painters pursued a more spontaneous work, catering to local cultural traditions and collecting fantastic imagery. The group soon disbanded in 1951, but some of its members, notably Appel, Jorn and Alechinsky, maintained its spirit in the following decades. Their painting is characterized by a great expressionist charge linked to the figures of Max Pechstein and Edward Munich, two of the great Nordic expressionists. His work is made with dense impasto and violent color games, which denote the agitated character of Nordic expressionism. Later, his language evolved in a softer line, approaching Hand Edge Painting. Appel was a tireless artist who explored multiple languages, from sculpture, ceramics, mural painting, stained glass or engraving. During his long artistic career he received numerous awards and collaborated with artists from other disciplines such as the poet Allen Ginsberg or the choreographer Min Tanaka. His first successes came in 1953, with the exhibition at the Palais des Beaux Arts in Brussels and his participation in the Biennial of Sao Paulo (he would return in 1959 and win the international prize for painting), and in 1954, when he received the UNESCO prize at the Venice Biennale and exhibited in Paris and New York. Appel is represented at the Guggenheim Museum and MoMA in New York, the Bilbao Fine Arts Museum, the Tate Gallery in London, the Albertina in Vienna, the Thyssen-Bornemisza, the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice and the Fine Arts Museum in Dordrecht, among many others.