Works of Art: Karel Appel

Works of art by Karel Appel are available at if ART Gallery, 1223 Lincoln Street, Columbia, SC.

Contact Wim Roefs at if-art-gallery@sc.twcbc.com or (803) 255-0068/(803) 238-2351.

Happy Battle, 1979

Lithograph, 71/160, 21 x 29 in., $ 1,100

(unframed)

Walking With My Bird, 1979

Lithograph, 139/160

21 1/4 x 29 1/4 in., $ 1,450/SOLD

Works of art by Karel Appel are available at if ART Gallery, 1223 Lincoln Street, Columbia, SC.

Contact Wim Roefs at if-art-gallery@sc.twcbc.com or (803) 255-0068/(803) 238-2351.

Biography: Karel Appel

Portraits of Karel Appel the younger, one with Dutch poet Bert Schierbeek, and of Appel in 2004, two years before his death.

KAREL APPEL (DUTCH, 1921-2006)

Karel Appel was among the stars of the 1950s-1960s international art world. In 1948, he was a co-founder of CoBrA, a group of Northern European artists whose work was related to, but developed independently from, American Abstract Expressionism. He moved to Paris, which, along with New York, became his main base. Like other CoBrA artists, Appel retained figuration at first in his freely painted, vigorous and colorful paintings, though he later went through non-objective stages. Appel was prolific and constantly reinvented himself as an artist during his long, active career. In addition to paintings, drawings and sculptures, he painted murals and worked in ceramics, stage design and stained glass. Appel also was a poet and recorded experimental music. In 1954, he won the UNESCO Prize at the Venice Biennale. Appel’s work is in museums across the world, including New York’s Museum of Modern Art, Guggenheim Museum and Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, D.C., Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts, the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, Minn., London’s Tate Gallery, the Museu de Arte de Sao Paulo, Brazil, and Madrid’s Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum.

Essay: CoBrA

C O B R A (1948 –1951)

The CoBrA group was with Art Informel and Tachism among the post-World War II European art movements that were related to but developed independently from Abstract Expressionism in the United States. CoBrA was named after Copenhagen, Brussels, and Amsterdam, the capital of many members’ home countries. The group organized exhibitions and published pamphlets, a journal and short monographs. As an organization, CoBrA only existed about three years, but many of its members had prominent careers afterward. The group’s core figures were Dutchmen Karel Appel, Corneille and Constant, Dane Asger Jorn and Belgians Pierre Alechinsky and the poet Christian Dotremont. Dozens of other artists belonged to the group in some fashion, including Lucebert, Reinhoud and Jacques Doucet. CoBrA art combined the energy, spontaneity and painterly qualities of Abstract Expressionism and Art Informel, the subject matter and imagery of Art Brut, children’s drawings, Nordic mythology and African figuration, and Surrealism’s subconscious approach to making art. It produced an aesthetic that became a mainstay in Western European art.