Karel Appel: A Gesture Of Color At The Philips Collection

Fri, Jun 17 - Sun, Sep 18  2016

From June 17 until September 28, the exhibition ‘Karel Appel: A Gesture Of Color’ is exhibited at the Philips Collection. Marking the 10th anniversary of the artist’s death, this exhibition features 22 paintings and sculptures by Dutch artist Karel Appel (1921–2006), perhaps the most renowned Dutch artist of the latter half of the 20th century and one of founding members of the avant-garde COBRA group. The exhibition is a part of a wider international reappraisal of Karel Appel’s work, which also includes exhibitions in The Hague, Paris, and Munich from 2014-2016. The exhibition is organized by The Phillips Collection in close collaboration with the Karel Appel Foundation, Amsterdam.

Courtesy of Karel Appel – The Philips Collection

Event

• July 21, 6:30 PM: Curator’s Perspective

Deputy Director for Curatorial and Academic Affairs Klaus Ottmann provides an overview of the exhibition “Karel Appel: A Gesture of Color” and shares examples of Appel’s related poetry.

About A Gesture Of Color

A Gesture of Color is a concise survey that provides a fresh look at an oeuvre that goes beyond the 1950s and COBRA, spanning more than 60 years. The show will revisit the artist’s early interest in psychopathological art as well as his highly personal—and sometimes almost abstract—interpretation of traditional subjects like the nude, the portrait, and the urban or rural landscape. Appel pushed his studio practice to extremes—his endless experimentation with styles and methods of painting confound categorization, from the early playful and childlike tableaux to his late “theatrical sculptural fantasies” that combine painting and photography with found objects and infused with African, Indonesian, and Native American mythologies. The exhibition will be accompanied by a full color, hardcover 80-page catalogue published by Sieveking Verlag in Berlin with an essay by Phillips Collection exhibition curator Klaus Ottmann.

About The Philips Collection

Encounter superb works of modern art in an intimate setting at The Phillips Collection, opened to the public in 1921 in Washington’s vibrant Dupont Circle neighborhood. Paintings by Renoir and Rothko, Bonnard and O’Keeffe, van Gogh and Diebenkorn are among the many stunning impressionist and modern works that fill the museum. Its distinctive building combines extensive new galleries with the former home of its founder, Duncan Phillips. The collection continues to develop with selective new acquisitions, many by contemporary artists.

About The Karel Appel Foundation

The Karel Appel Foundation, a non-profit, private organization, was established in Amsterdam on May 19th 1999, with the Registry of Foundations, ref. no. 333.069.26, fed. no. 80 83 86 372 B 01. 
At that time the Foundation took over the supervision of the Karel Appel Archive, which it now maintains and updates regularly. The purpose of the foundation is to preserve the artworks, to promote public awareness and knowledge of Karel Appel’s oeuvre and to supervise publication of the Oeuvre Catalogue of the paintings, the works on paper and the sculptures. The Karel Appel Foundation holds all of the copyrights. The intellectual rights of the artist are retained by the heir, who exercises and administers sole power over the artistic property linked to Karel Appel’s work for the purposes of protecting the name, image, and rights deriving from the person of the artist, as well as everything relating to the defence of the said work and person.