Karel Appel — Femme et oiseau, 1953, on Gallery Wall

5 October 2017 · Paris

Karel Appel's Femme et oiseau (1953) hangs in a black float frame against a clean white museum wall, its wall label visible to the right. The paint is applied in thick, slashing strokes — blue, red, black, and flashes of yellow colliding into a figure and bird barely resolved from the chaos. Appel was a founding member of the CoBrA movement, and this canvas carries its full force: raw, immediate, uninterested in prettiness. The impasto surface reads almost sculptural from this angle.