Karel Appel (1921-2006)

Embrace (1991) demonstrates the full force of Karel Appel’s pulsating, effervescent style: bursting with an ineffable joie de vivre, Appel’s impasto brushstrokes seem almost to vibrate on the surface of the canvas, as its central electric red reacts against the shifting blue-green tones of the background and dynamic slashes of black suggest one or more human forms at the work’s heart. A founding member of the pioneering art collective Cobra, whose brilliant, irrepressible primitivism irradiated European art in the years after World War II, Appel continued to mine a rich seam of expressionism and charming naiveté that was at once childlike and painterly. At the heart of Appel’s vision was a desire to return to or recapture a primal, animalistic way of painting that imagined the process of image-making as a moment of atavistic self-realisation and self-consciousness – as it was once was for our ancient ancestors, and still is for children today. ‘I dream of one day seeing a great prehistoric animal who with its enormous paw would be drawing a human being’ the artist once said, ‘To see a man painted by a prehistoric animal! Now that would be spectacular, extraordinary! One would be witnessing something archaic, primordial! Our earth being born with a sort of visceral scream!’ (K. Appel, interviewed by A. Verdet, Karel Appel: Paintings 1980-1985, exh. cat., Arnolfini Gallery, Bristol, 1986, p. 18).