Karel Appel / Bio
Karel Appel, painter, sculptor, poet, was born on April 25, 1921 in Amsterdam and died on May 3, 2006 in Zurich. From 1942 to 1944 he studied at the Rijksakademie voor Beeldende Kunsten in Amsterdam. Together with Corneille and Constant, he founded the Dutch Experimental Group in Amsterdam in 1948, which later in the same year merged in Paris with the international group CoBrA, which existed until 1951. From 1950 Appel lived and worked in Paris. In 1957 he began to alternate betweem Paris and New York, later also spending time in Monte Carlo and from the 1990s also in Tuscany.
His work has been exhibited in major international museums since the 1950s and is part of many leading museum collections, including those of the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, Guggenheim and MoMA in New York, The Phillips Collection in Washington, DC, Tate Modern in London, the Musée national d'Art moderne - Centre Pompidou in Paris and the Castello di Rivoli in Turin. He is internationally regarded as the most important twentieth century painters of the post-war Netherlands. Slewe Gallery showed his last works in 2011 in the exhibition Couplet 7 curated by Rudi Fuchs, and in 2016 with a group of abstract paintings from 1978-1980, entitled Reset. In 2021 Slewe Gallery exhibited his series Horizon of Tuscany from 1995.