.jpg?w=1)
Lot Essay
This work is registered in the Archive of the Karel Appel Foundation.
'Terreur en Hurricane waren nog niet uit Den Bosch, of ik moet ze al weer afstaan aan O.K. en W voor een tournee door Noorwegen, zelfs met foto's erbij. Zoals je weet, zeg ik altijd ja, omdat ik het voor een schilder belangrijker vind dat zijn werk in de wereld circuleert dan alleen maar bij de particulier hangt. Maar ik voel me wel erg "ont-appeld"!' (Letter by Piet Sanders to Karel Appel, 27 January 1965)
Karel Appel painted Terreur, a few years after the demise of the CoBrA movement in which he had played a central role. He has rendered the figures in his trademark slashes of bold, garishly colored paint that resemble the aggressive scratches of a cat in a scrape. One can recognize a human figure and a cat in a terrifying situation. Throughout his career, and particularly in his early, most sought-after work, his oeuvre is dominated by figures and animals.
The paintings that he began to make from the 1950s mark the artist's first completely unfettered engagement with his materials, and resulted in a series of extraordinarily intense and vibrant expressions that hover between abstraction and figuration.
Appel's powerful graphic forms seem to capture the essential vitality of the beasts and figures that emerge from the fierce energy of his brushwork.
'I never try to make a painting; it is a howl, it is naked, it is like a child, it is a caged tiger. I am the surgeon of space and paint human spaces. My tube is like a rocket writing on its own space', Appel declared in 1953, 'I try to make the impossible possible. What is happening I cannot forsee; it is a surprise. Painting, like passion, is an emotion full of truth and rings a living sound like the roar coming from a lion's breast.' ('My Paint is like a Rocket' c. 1953 reproduced in Theories and Documents of Contemporary Art, K. Stiles and P. Selz (eds.), University of California Press 1996, p. 209)
'Terreur en Hurricane waren nog niet uit Den Bosch, of ik moet ze al weer afstaan aan O.K. en W voor een tournee door Noorwegen, zelfs met foto's erbij. Zoals je weet, zeg ik altijd ja, omdat ik het voor een schilder belangrijker vind dat zijn werk in de wereld circuleert dan alleen maar bij de particulier hangt. Maar ik voel me wel erg "ont-appeld"!' (Letter by Piet Sanders to Karel Appel, 27 January 1965)
Karel Appel painted Terreur, a few years after the demise of the CoBrA movement in which he had played a central role. He has rendered the figures in his trademark slashes of bold, garishly colored paint that resemble the aggressive scratches of a cat in a scrape. One can recognize a human figure and a cat in a terrifying situation. Throughout his career, and particularly in his early, most sought-after work, his oeuvre is dominated by figures and animals.
The paintings that he began to make from the 1950s mark the artist's first completely unfettered engagement with his materials, and resulted in a series of extraordinarily intense and vibrant expressions that hover between abstraction and figuration.
Appel's powerful graphic forms seem to capture the essential vitality of the beasts and figures that emerge from the fierce energy of his brushwork.
'I never try to make a painting; it is a howl, it is naked, it is like a child, it is a caged tiger. I am the surgeon of space and paint human spaces. My tube is like a rocket writing on its own space', Appel declared in 1953, 'I try to make the impossible possible. What is happening I cannot forsee; it is a surprise. Painting, like passion, is an emotion full of truth and rings a living sound like the roar coming from a lion's breast.' ('My Paint is like a Rocket' c. 1953 reproduced in Theories and Documents of Contemporary Art, K. Stiles and P. Selz (eds.), University of California Press 1996, p. 209)