«Through play, we renew contact with childhood – My art is childlike. »
Karel Appel
Karel Appel
In 1949 he created a mural for a cafeteria located in the City Hall in Amsterdam, but public disapproval caused this to be covered over in whitewash for the next ten years. At the 1954 Venice Biennale he awarded the UNESCO prize. In the same year several works by Karel Appel were exhibited at the Martha Jackson Gallery in New York. In the late 1950s he painted a series of portraits of American jazz musicians and in 1960 he received the Guggenheim International Award for his art. Over two decades he painted murals for architectural projects and created public artworks in a wide range of media, including ceramic tiles, marble, glass and concrete. In the late 1960s he started to create sculptures from layers of polystyrene covered with plywood and paint. He then went on to use aluminum, plastic foam and carved polyurethane, which he painted to look like solid marble or wood. From the 1980s, up to his death in 2006, he created many paintings of still life subjects, landscapes and human figures. The subjects of these paintings were formed from free use of color and brushstrokes, without the discipline of drawing. Read Less
