No. 96040369

Karel Appel (1921-2006) - Sans titre
No. 96040369

Karel Appel (1921-2006) - Sans titre
Oil painting
Support: Pasted paper on canvas
Numbering: Unique Piece
Signature: Hand signed
Frame dimensions: 65x93cm
Artwork dimensions: 49x77cm
Framing: Black stained wood
Very good overall condition, refer to the photos for the condition report.
Shipping: UPS Express, highly secure packaging, insurance included.
Authentication: Sold with a gallery certificate of authenticity and an expert report from Il Ponte, Millon group auction. Provenance: Geneva, private collection.
Note: To best reproduce true colors, the first eight photos were taken under artificial lighting at 4000 K (cold light), while the following nine were taken under standard lighting at 2700 K (warm light).
Information about the work and the artist
His work is present in the collections of prestigious international museums, notably in the Netherlands, France, Austria, Germany, the United Kingdom, Sweden, and Italy. His presence also extends to the United States and Canada, highlighting his longstanding international recognition.
In this oil on paper mounted on canvas, signed and dated 1973, Karel Appel reveals a brutal and joyful flash of inspiration, a shock of forms and colors that condenses, within a stretched surface, the very spirit of the CoBrA movement of which he was one of the most radical founders. Rare in his work — Appel produced few oils on paper — this piece stands out both for its medium, for the strength of its material, and for the explosive intensity of its composition. Because here, the painting does not depict anything: it strikes. It asserts itself as a living, visceral material, charged with nerves and screams, and it is this thick materiality, almost flesh-like, of the oil applied in powerful layers that gives it meaning. Every brushstroke, every sharply cut color, every motif with unstable boundaries reflects Appel's desire to let the form emerge in its most primitive immediacy, without correction, without reworking, like an organic push.
The universe of the painting, traversed by three untamed figures — a childlike being on the left, two heads intertwined on the right, a shape half-eyed, half-bird in the overhang — evokes hybrid silhouettes, half-human, half-totemic, that haunt the CoBrA imagination. App does not paint a world: he creates an embryo of one. The deep, saturated blue background seems to want to hold the figures within a mental sky, but they overflow, proliferate, and intertwine. The black line that outlines the masses does not enclose them; it electrifies them. And this is the signature of CoBrA: an aesthetic of childhood, instinct, and explosion, but traversed by a culture of myth, masks, and primal tension.
Car Karel Appel, in the tradition of the CoBrA experiments (1948–1951), does not make spontaneity a whim. He structures it as a necessary violence. A way of returning to childhood not to idealize it, but to find in its brutal forms, primary colors, deformed figures, a language before language, a cry before style. Oil on paper here directly responds to this desire to inscribe color as a pulsion, as a jet. It is not about modeling: it is about impacting, depositing paint as a physical act — an eruption. Close-up, we see the body of the painting itself working the surface: streaks, lumps of material, pigment crusts are as many micro-reliefs where emotion is frozen.
She does not come after a stable civilization but upstream, where form still springs forth from vital disorder. The work does not seek unity; it seeks energy before unity. It is an organism in the process of being born, a yell of tawny color thrown on a black wall.
And if we were to give it a metaphor, it would not be that of a painting. It would be that of a child who has contained their world for too long and who, suddenly, vomits it out in incandescent shapes, still trembling, still filled with joyful terror. This is what this unique piece by Karel Appel contains: a primitive, unrestrained, luminous and black beat at the same time, the wild rhythm of a form discovering itself.
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