Karel Appel Colorful Expressionist Hand Painted Wood Cobra Sculpture Pop Art, 1977

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Description

This is an original wooden sculpture with hand painting on both sides. it does not appear to be signed or … Read more This is an original wooden sculpture with hand painting on both sides. it does not appear to be signed or numbered and does not currently have any label. I believe this might be the proof, There was an edition of these and this is a unique variant. All done by hand.
It is on a base and revolves and rotates easily as there are ball bearings. It is very well made.

Christiaan Karel Appel (1921-2006) was a Dutch artist, painter, sculptor, and poet. Born in Amsterdam, the Netherlands, he died in Zurich, Switzerland. He started painting at the age of fourteen and studied at the Rijksakademie in Amsterdam in the 1940s. He was one of the founders of the avant-garde movement Cobra in 1948. He was also an avid sculptor and has had works featured in MoMA, the Stedelijk and other museums worldwide.
At fourteen, Appel produced his first real painting on canvas, a still life of a fruit basket. For his fifteenth birthday, his wealthy uncle Karel Chevalier gave him a paint set and an easel. An avid amateur painter himself, Chevalier gave his namesake some lessons in painting.
From 1940 to 1943, during the German occupation, Appel studied at the Rijksakademie van Beeldende Kunsten in Amsterdam, and it was there he met the young painter Guillaume Corneille and, some years later, Constant; they became close friends for years.
Appel had his first show in Groningen in 1946. In 1949 he participated with the other CoBrA artists in the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam; this generated a huge scandal and many objections in the press and public. He was influenced by Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse, and the French brute-art artist Jean Dubuffet. In 1947 he started sculpting with all kinds of used materials (in the technique of assemblage) and painted them in bright colors: white, red, yellow, blue, and black. He joined the Experimentele Groep in Holland together with the young Dutch painters Anton Rooskens, Theo Wolvecamp, and Jan Nieuwenhuys. Later the Belgian writer Hugo Claus joined the group.
In 1948 Appel joined CoBrA (from Copenhagen, Brussels, Amsterdam) together with the Dutch artists Corneille, Pierre Alechinsky, Ernest Mancoba, Constant, Asger Jorn and Jan Nieuwenhuys (see also Aart Kemink), and with the Belgian poet Christian Dotremont. Their working method was based on spontaneity and experiment, and they drew their inspiration in particular from children’s drawings, Graffiti, primitive art forms and from the Surrealist work of Paul Klee and Joan Miro. Cobra was a milestone in the development of Tachisme and European abstract expressionism. The new art of the CoBrA group was not popular in the Netherlands, but it found a warm and broad welcome in Denmark. By 1939, Danish artists had already started to make spontaneous art and one of their sources of inspiration was Danish and Nordic mythology. Appel moved to Paris in 1950 and developed his international reputation by travelling to Mexico, the USA, Yugoslavia, and Brazil. He also lived in New York City and Florence. His first American gallery exhibition took place in 1954 at the Martha Jackson Gallery. The following year his painting Child and Beast II (1951) was included in the influential exhibition, The New Decade at the Museum of Modern Art which featured the work of twenty-two European painters and sculptors including newcomers like Francis Bacon, Jean Dubuffet, and Pierre Soulages. He is particularly noted for his mural work. After 1990 he became much more popular in the Netherlands; he had several big shows in Amsterdam and Brussels, organized by director Rudy Fuchs. Also, the CoBrA-museum in Amstelveen organized several shows featuring his work. He became the most famous Dutch CoBrA artist.
Appel's work has been exhibited in a number of galleries, including the Anita Shapolsky Gallery in New York City, Galerie Lelong in Paris, Galerie Ulysses in Vienna, and Gallery LL in Amsterdam.
Appel died on 3 May 2006 in his home in Zürich, Switzerland. He suffered from a heart ailment. He was buried on 16 May 2006 at the Père Lachaise Cemetery in Paris, France.

Public collections

Museum de Fundatie, Zwolle, The Netherlands
Rijksmuseum, The Netherlands
The Phillips Collection, Washington DC, USA
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston MA
Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo U
The Museum of Modern Art, New York
Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum
San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden
Tate Modern, London
Centraal Museum, Utrecht
Cobra Museum voor Moderne Kunst
Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam
Moderna Museet, Stockholm
Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza Madrid
IVAM, Centre Julio González Valencia Spain
Museo de Bellas Artes de Bilbao, Spain
Museo de Arte Moderno, Mexico City
National Museum of Art Osaka, Japan
Collezione Peggy Guggenheim, Venice
Tel Aviv Museum of Art Tel Aviv, Israel
Museum Ludwig See less