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Curator: Let's turn our attention to this captivating, untitled work by Karel Appel. What strikes you immediately about this piece? Editor: It’s raw. The colors scream—especially that almost violently applied red. I get the sense of looking at something primordial, something barely held together, ready to burst. Curator: Indeed. Appel was a leading figure in the CoBrA movement, a postwar group that embraced spontaneity and the childlike in their art. The thick application of paint – the impasto, the matter-painting approach – reflects that ethos. It’s almost sculptural. Editor: Absolutely. It’s like he attacked the canvas with the paint. Are those…figures? A monster next to a lopsided Picasso-esque horse? Whatever it is, they seem like raw manifestations of id. The shapes and the colors have that sense of freedom from the restrictions of classical subject matter. Curator: Figuration is definitely a recurring theme in Appel’s work, though filtered through an abstract expressionist lens. There’s a tension here between the recognizable and the utterly chaotic, a dance between control and abandon. It resonates with the anxieties of post-war Europe, finding expression in liberated artistic forms. Editor: Post-war angst manifested in technicolor dream monsters! The intensity is incredible. You feel it, almost physically. It’s unnerving but also oddly joyous. As though something suppressed for a long time finally got a chance to scream out, albeit nonsensically, into existence. Curator: And in that scream, a strange beauty. It challenges us to confront what art, and by extension, expression itself, is for. Editor: And that, my friends, is the point: Let’s all give up decorum and unleash the monster inside. Figuratively speaking, of course, unless you ARE a technicolor monster… then maybe just simmer down a tad. Curator: Precisely. An exercise in unadulterated expression, this work from Appel opens a valuable historical lens for comprehending the liberation in artmaking that came after a time of profound social unrest.