Slewe Gallery is pleased to announce the exhibition (Fe)Male by Karel Appel (1921-2006), one of the most important Dutch artists of the second half of the twentieth century. The exhibition features eight of Appel’s Nude paintings from the years 1994 and 1995. It opens on October 12 and will be on view until November 16. With this exhibition, Slewe Gallery celebrates its 30th anniversary.
The female and male figures featured in these paintings by Karel Appel emerge from a background of rough, loose streaks of oil paint. They have been painted masterfully in a wet-on-wet technique and are given as an expression bold confidence. The colorful brush strokes with which the figures have been constructed extend into the surrounding background. Head, torso, arms and thighs fill the tight space. Legs and feet are cut off at the picture’s edge. These nudes come at the viewer frontally and unabashedly.
As a classical painter, Karel Appel kept on returning to timeless motifs such as figure and landscape. The nudes shown here were made in New York during the years 1994 and 1995. During that same period Appel also painted landscapes in Tuscany, which have been on view previously at Slewe. These were monumental, horizontally oriented paintings of views from his house in Tuscany. These 'reclining' Italian landscapes are a pendant to the upright figures of New York. The lyrical and cosmic quality of nature as opposed to bold, raw urban life.
In recent years, Appel's late works have received increasing international attention with major exhibitions in internationally renowned galleries such as Max Hetzler in Berlin and London, Jahn und Jahn in Munich, BLUM (former Blum and Poe) in Los Angeles and New York, and Almine Rech in Paris. Slewe Gallery has previously shown Appel’s late work in the 2011 exhibition Couplet 7, curated by Rudi Fuchs, a group of abstract paintings from 1978-1980 in Reset in 2016 and, in 2021, paintings and works on paper from the series Horizon of Tuscany from 1995. This exhibition is again organized in close collaboration with the Karel Appel Foundation. A catalog will be published.