Karel APPEL - Untitled (Happy New Year), 1995 - Pastel on paper

Karel Appel : (1921-2006), is a dutch painter and sculptor, cofounder of the group CoBrA. He studied at the Académie royale des beaux-arts in Amsterdam between 1940 and 1943, and started exhibiting in 1946. He was influenced by Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse and Jean Dubuffet. He joined the Nederlandse Experimentele Groep, and then the CoBrA movement in 1948, with Corneille, Constant, Asger Jorn, Jan Nieuwenhuys and Christian Dotremont. In 1950, he went to Paris, and developed an international reputation, traveling to Mexico, USA, Yougoslavia and Brasil. His first exhibition took place in 1946 in Groningue in Netherlands. Then at the Palais des Beaux-arts de Bruxelles (1953), the Martha Jackson Gallery in New York (1954), the Galerie Rive Droite in Paris (1955-1956), in 1968 at the Centre d'art contemporain de Paris, at the Centraal Museum (Retrospective), Utrecht, Netherlands (1970), the musée d'art contemporain de Montréal (1972), the New York Cultural Center (1973), the Wildenstein Gallery (London), the Fuji Television Gallery (Tokyo) 1975, the Museo de Arte Moderno (retrospective), Mexico (1977), the Paris Art Center (1988), the National Museum of Art, Osaka, the Hiroshima City Museum of Contemporary Art (1989), the Fundacion Juan Miró, Barcelona (1990), the National Museum of Comtemporary Art, Seoul (1994), the galerie Lelong, Paris (2003, 2009, 2011), and at the Cobra Museum, Amstelveen (2005). He died in 2006 and was burried at the Père-Lachaise cemetery.