Image: Grand Rapids Art Museum, Paris
Karel Appel: ‘Start Again Like A Child’ is scheduled from August 12 through November 15, 2026, with the presentation listed for Level 3, Gallery 6.
Dutch artist Karel Appel (1921–2006) captured the founding impulse of CoBrA, the avant-garde collective he helped establish in 1948. Formed in the wake of World War II, CoBrA rejected both sterile abstraction and conventional realism in favor of something more gestural, spontaneous and deliberately unschooled, a practice rooted in expressive freedom and instinctive mark-making.
Though the group disbanded in 1951, after Appel had already relocated to New York the year before, he carried CoBrA’s spirit with him throughout his career.
Karel Appel’s Looking Around (1971) is a lithograph on paper.
