(Fe)Male | Karel Appel

Slewe Gallery is pleased to announce the opening of the exhibition (Fe)Male by Karel Appel (1921–2006), the Netherlands' best-known post-World War II twentieth-century painter. The exhibition features eight paintings from his Nude series dating from 1994 and 1995. The exhibition opens on 12 October and runs through 16 November. With this exhibition, Slewe Galerie celebrates its thirtieth anniversary.

The male and female figures in these paintings by Karel Appel emerge from a background of raw, loose sweeps of oil paint. Virtuosically rendered in a wet-on-wet technique, they stand boldly within the painting. The colourful patches and contours from which the figures are constructed spill over into the surrounding space. Head, torso, arms, and thighs fill the tight composition. Lower legs and feet are cropped at the canvas edge. Frontal and unabashed, these nudes confront the viewer.

As a classical painter, Karel Appel repeatedly returned to timeless motifs such as landscape and figure. The nudes on view here were made in New York in 1994 and 1995. During the same period, he also painted landscapes in Tuscany, which were previously shown at Slewe in 2021. Those were monumental, horizontal paintings of the view from his home in Tuscany. These horizontal Italian landscapes form a counterpart to these standing figures from New York: the lyricism of nature set against the brutal, raw pulse of urban life. In recent years, Appel’s late work has drawn increasing international acclaim, with major exhibitions at internationally renowned galleries such as Max Hetzler in Berlin, London, and Paris, Jahn und Jahn in Munich, Galerie Ulysses in Vienna, BLUM (formerly Blum and Poe) in Los Angeles, and Almine Rech in Paris. Slewe Gallery previously exhibited Appel’s late work in 2011 in the Rudi Fuchs-curated exhibition Couplet 7, in 2016 a g