"I have always dreamed of revolutionary forms and expressions, reflecting life itself and society, nature and the city. I have always dreamed of capturing the secret movement of existence in the most spontaneous, flexible, and transparent way" - Karel Appel.
Karel Appel graduated from the Amsterdam Academy of Fine Arts in 1943 but had to wait 4 years for his first exhibition in Groningen. His first major project, the decoration of the Amsterdam City Hall, was severely criticized and the mural was covered up for ten years. After this setback, he moved to Paris and began to associate with many of the artists who would later become influential on the 20th-century art scene. In November 1948, Appel and some other young artists formed the CoBrA group at Café Notre Dame in Paris. The name is an anagram of the members' respective home cities - Copenhagen, Brussels, and Amsterdam. Other original members were Asger Jorn from Denmark, Christian Dotremont and Joseph Noiret from Belgium, and Constant and Beverloo Corneille from the Netherlands.
The CoBrA group was a forum for experimental collaboration between artists who advocated and worked with spontaneous expressionism whose abstract features represented a break with the more formal, geometrically abstract painting typical of the time. CoBrA members worked on the theory that art was directly related to the human psyche and the artist's mood.
The composition of the auction is bold yet playful. The naïve idiom, colorful, powerful forms, and vivid textures are characteristic of Appel's semi-figurative paintings. Despite their sometimes rather brutal feel, his works also give an impression of lightness and movement where dynamic shapes and strong colors contribute to an emotional atmosphere.