By Karel Appel
Located in Surfside, FL
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...
Category
1970s Abstract Expressionist Karel Appel Figurative Sculptures