KAREL APPEL – Encounter in Spring and what follows at Galerie Max Hetzler, Berlin, 2023

KAREL APPEL Encounter in Spring and what follows curated by Franz W. Kaiser Bleibtreustraße 45 13 January – 25 February 2023 Galerie Max Hetzler is pleased to announce Encounter in Spring and what follows, an exhibition of work by Karel Appel (1921–2006), centring around a selection of paintings spanning from 1958 until 2006. A founding figure of the avant-garde group CoBrA (1948–1951), Appel began his career in the aftermath of the Second World War. Over the course of six decades, the artist experimented widely, drawing on sources as diverse as folk art, outsider art and Jazz’s spirit of improvisation, and working across painting, sculpture, drawing, and stage design. Distinguishable for his astonishing capacity to innovate, Appel never settled in a signature style, media or subject. Alternating between abstraction and figuration, he adopted a material-oriented approach in his practice and promoted a genuine form of expression. The exhibition’s starting point is the monumental and mesmeric painting Rencontre au printemps (Encounter in Spring), which was commissioned in 1958 for the inauguration of the UNESCO headquarters in Paris. To mark the occasion, UNESCO invited Appel – among luminaries including Jean Arp, Alexander Calder, Isamu Noguchi, Roberto Matta, Joan Miró, Henry Moore, and Pablo Picasso – to make a contribution. Appel painted the ambitious work, not on-site or in his Paris studio, which couldn’t accommodate its size, but in Sam Francis’ studio in Villejuif. He had, by this point, just returned from his first trip to New York for his second exhibition at Martha Jackson Gallery and was profoundly marked by his encounter with the painters of the New York School. As such, Encounter in Spring constitutes Appel’s first painting on such a momentous scale and remains one of the highlights of the UNESCO art collection 0:15 "Still Life", 1970 0:25 "Window", 1980 0:46 "Tree no.6", "Tree no.4", "Tree no.7", 1979 1:15 "Up to the Sky no.3", 1998 1:56 "Birth of a Landscape", 1999, "Untitled", 1999 3:05 "Entrance of the Almighty no.12 ", 2001 3:31 "Empty Black Sky", 2000 3:47 "Nimble Acrobat", 2000 2:31 "White Male Head Over Water", 2017 4:00 "Thought’s Boomerang", 2000 4:41 "Visage-Paysage no.4", 1977 4:43 "Natural Phenomenon ", 1991 4:58 "Shattered World", 1960 5:18 "Rencontre au printemps", 1958 5:57 "Evening Forest", 2003 Learn more about this exhibition: https://www.maxhetzler.com/exhibition... Subscribe for the latest news on Galerie Max Hetzler's artists, exhibitions, publications, and programme: https://www.maxhetzler.com/contact/#n... Follow us on social media: Facebook:   / galeriemaxhetzler   Instagram:   / galeriemaxhetzler   #MaxHetzler #MaxHetzlerExhibitions #MaxHetzlerArtists #KarelAppel