Karel Appel

Karel Appel was born in Amsterdam in 1921. With early influences like Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse and Jean Dubuffet, he received a scholarship to at the Rijksakademie van Beeldende Kunsten.

Two years after his first solo show in the city of Groningen in 1946, Appel and a number of like-minded artists launched the avant-garde CoBrA movement: so named because its members hailed from Copenhagen, Brussels and Amsterdam. These artists included Christian Dotremont and Asger Jorn, and they took inspiration from folk and children’s art. They allowed their imagination and paintbrushes to roam free, and the results were artworks of exuberance and spontaneity.

While the group disbanded in 1951, Appel, continued to create art in a similar style afterwards. He became known for working with vivid colours, vigorous brushstrokes, thick impasto, and aggressively distorted animal and human figures as subjects.

From the mid-1950s onwards, he spent increasing amounts of time in New York, where his work started to grow freer and show an affinity with that of the Abstract Expressionists — albeit always with the retention of some figurative element.

During the 1950s and 1960s, Appel painted numerous murals for public buildings. Alongside painting, Appel also found success working in a number of other media including textiles, ceramics, and printmaking well into the 1980s.

Karel Appel died in 2006 in Zurich.