Karel Appel

KAREL APPEL (Netherlands, 1921 - Switzerland, 2006).
Untitled, 1979.
Mixed media on paper glued to canvas.
Signed in the lower left corner. Signed and dated on the back.
Measurements: 76,5 x 57 cm; 96 x 77 cm (frame).
In 1979, Appel was already an internationally recognized artist, installed between Europe and the United States, and deeply interested in painting as a physical and emotional experience. Faced with the rise of conceptual art and the more intellectual practices of the 1960s and 1970s, Appel maintained a deliberately anti-academic position: he defended a direct painting, almost childlike in appearance, but charged with intensity and accumulated knowledge. In this sense, the work can be read as a reaffirmation of his artistic credo: "I don't paint, I hit," he affirmed, underlining the instinctive character of his creation.
The canvas is articulated through an apparently chaotic structure of large chromatic masses, deep greens, intense yellows, vibrant reds, spatulate whites and enveloping blacks applied with a broad, almost violent gesture. The painting does not seek mimetic representation, but evocation: forms that suggest bodies, faces or creatures emerge and dissolve in the pictorial matter, reinforcing the tension between figuration and abstraction that characterizes Appel's language. The expressive use of color, applied in thick layers and with visible tool marks, turns the surface into a field of action where the act of painting is as important as the final result.
The stylistic uniqueness of this piece lies in its balance between freedom and control. Although the gesture is impulsive, the composition reveals a refined spatial and chromatic awareness, the fruit of decades of experimentation. The work thus embodies a synthesis between the expressive radicalism of Appel's beginnings and the formal complexity of his mature stage.
Central figure of the COBRA group (Copenhagen, Brussels, Amsterdam), founded in 1948. Although the COBRA movement disbanded in the early 1950s. His first successes came in 1953, with the exhibition at the Palais des Beaux Arts in Brussels and his participation in the Sao Paulo Biennial (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.