The Cobra Museum of Modern Art is featuring the exhibition 'Karel Appel. Jazz 1958 - 1962', commencing 9 February 2008. This will focus on the 1958 - 1962 period, the years in which Karel Appel discovered a new artistic idiom, thereby triggering a definitive breakthrough and earning him major recognition worldwide. They are also the years in which he was deeply influenced by jazz and became friends with such jazz luminaries as Dizzy Gillespie, Count Basie and Miles Davis.

Karel Appel in Cobra Museum
Jazz 1958-1962
09.02 - 01.06.2008
The exhibition comprises some 23 large-scale, major works - 20 paintings from the early sixties and the rest from a series of canvases made at Groeneveld castle in 1961, during the shooting of the Jan Vrijman documentary 'De werkelijkheid van Karel Appel' (The Reality of Karel Appel). This was recently nominated by the Dutch public as one of the best documentaries of post-war times. Vrijman's inventive documentary style especially conceived for the film, in which he films Appel painting from a frontal perspective by cutting out a hole in the artist's canvas, was subsequently widely imitated.
Also on show are 24 photographs made by Ed van der Elsken during the painting and filming session, while two films on Appel by Jan Vrijman are also being shown. The paintings can be viewed to the background music of swinging jazz and sound extracts from Appel's 'Muziek Barbare' project.

Karel Appel (1921 Amsterdam - 2006 Zurich)
Karel Appel is undoubtedly the Netherlands' most famous painter, sculptor and poet of the post-war years. He was co-founder of the Experimental Group Holland and the CoBrA movement. In the mid-1950s Karel Appel broke away from the idiom of the CoBrA period with almost abstract paintings in which thick layers of paint were expressively and spontaneously applied to the canvas. Appel's immense vitality and experimental power were captured on film by the journalist Jan Vrijman in 1961. In the late 1950s and early 1960s, periods in which his work emanates this driven fervour, Appel gained increasing international acclaim. He spent longer periods of time in New York, allowing himself to be swept along by jazz music, especially while working on his paintings.

The exhibition has been curated by guest curator Jan Hein Sassen.
There is also a publication to coincide with the exhibition.