25 october 2024, Flor Linckens
Karel Appel in Slewe Gallery: expressive nudes bursting from the canvas
This autumn, Slewe Gallery in Amsterdam celebrates its thirtieth anniversary with an exhibition by Karel Appel. This show, the fourth collaboration between the gallery and the Karel Appel Foundation, features eight paintings from Appel’s "Nude" series, which he created in the mid-1990s. These works form a unique series within his oeuvre, in which he constantly experimented with colour, form and abstraction.
Karel Appel is widely regarded as the most influential Dutch painter of the post-World War II era. His expressive style is characterised by wild, bold forms, vibrant colours, thick layers of paint and dynamic lines. Appel’s work often depicts creatures that evoke both animals and children, with paint applied directly from the tube for an immediate and unrestrained impact.
Appel was born on 25 April 1921 in a fairly regular Amsterdam family; his grandfather was a milkman and his father ran a barbershop. Although his father expected him to take over the family business, young Appel had other ideas. When he was fifteen, the first seeds of his artistic journey were planted by his uncle, who gifted him a painting set. Together, they ventured into nature to paint en plein air, inspired by Impressionism. When he expressed his ambition to become an artist, his parents threw him out of the house. During the German occupation, Appel began studying at the Rijksakademie in Amsterdam, where he formed a close friendship with Corneille. Together, they challenged the academy’s traditional curriculum, drawing inspiration instead from artists like Picasso and his influences. Appel was also influenced by children’s drawings and would continue collaborating across various disciplines throughout his career, including music and poetry.
Together with Corneille, Appel travelled to Liège and Paris to exhibit their work. In 1948, he met Constant Anton Nieuwenhuys, and with Corneille, they founded the 'Experimentele Groep in Holland'. As the group grew and connected with similar movements in Denmark and Belgium, the avant-garde CoBrA movement was founded in Paris in 1948, an acronym for Copenhagen-Brussels-Amsterdam. However, the work of Appel and the CoBrA movement was not initially well-received in the Netherlands. His first exhibition at the Stedelijk Museum sparked public scandal, prompting him to retreat to Paris, where he soon gained international acclaim. It wasn’t until 1968 that Appel would experience the same level of success in the Netherlands that he had already enjoyed internationally.
In 1951, illness and disagreements led to the end of CoBrA’s international meetings, thus marking the end of the movement. Appel continued to seek innovation, working ever more impulsively. His work was exhibited worldwide and he received several prestigious awards.
In 1957, he moved to New York, then viewed as the new capital of the art world. By 1990, Appel was dividing his time between New York, Connecticut, Monaco and Tuscany, each location significantly influencing his work. While in Tuscany, he focused on landscape painting, a genre he had explored in his youth thanks to his uncle. Some of these works were exhibited at Slewe Gallery in 2021. Appel gave these landscapes his own distinct interpretation, making them unmistakably his.
The "Nude" series, painted in New York in 1994-1995 and now on display at Slewe Gallery, focuses on the human body. These works appear influenced by the raw, urban surroundings in which they were created, and Appel’s New York studio was indeed a place of experimentation. Where his horizontal landscapes evoke calm and introspection, these frontal, vertical portraits are powerful and confrontational. The paintings in the "Nude" series are marked by Appel’s vibrant, dynamic style: the figures seem almost to burst from the edges of the canvas, constructed with expressive and spontaneous lines and planes of intense colour. They stand in stark contrast to idealised depictions of the human body that we know from art history. Using a wet-on-wet technique, Appel’s composition exudes a deep sense of motion and vitality. The background is almost as important as the figure itself, with abstract shapes and colours energising the composition and amplifying the work’s vitality. This reflects Appel’s ongoing search for a balance between figuration and abstraction. The exhibition at Slewe Gallery is accompanied by a catalogue.
Karel Appel passed away on 3 May 2006 in Zurich and was buried in the famous Père Lachaise Cemetery in Paris, where other artists such as Amedeo Modigliani and Max Ernst are also laid to rest. His work is housed in renowned collections such as the Centre Pompidou, Tate Modern, MoMA, Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Hirshhorn Museum, the National Gallery of Canada, the National Galleries of Scotland, the Stedelijk Museum, the Rijksmuseum, Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, the Cobra Museum, the Kröller-Müller Museum, the Van Abbemuseum and Kunstmuseum Den Haag. In recent years, his work has also been shown by important galleries such as Max Hetzler, BLUM and Almine Rech.
