Karel Appel

Karel Appel was a Dutch artist famed for his dynamic, colorful, semi-abstract paintings, sculptures and graphic art. He began painting as a teenager and studied at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts, Amsterdam. 

Appel was one of the founding members of the COBRA (Copenhagen, Brussels and Amsterdam) avant-garde movement that became associated with bold, expressive compositions, often inspired by folkloric themes and children’s art.

He held his first solo show in 1946 at Het Beerenhuis, Groningen, in the Netherlands, and also took part in a Young Painters group exhibition at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, where he created a mural for the restaurant, before moving to Paris. In the following years, he created several murals for public buildings.

Appel was awarded the UNESCO Prize at the 1954 Venice Biennale. By the 1960s, he’d relocated to New York and also later lived in Italy and Switzerland. His art became increasingly abstract in the following decades, marked by thickly layered pigment, increasingly dynamic brushstrokes and small-sized, raw figurative motifs. Appel’s work has been exhibited extensively over the decades, with a major retrospective held in 1972 in the US and Canada. His art can be found in several public and private collections, including at the MoMA.

He died on May 3, 2006, in Zurich.