Karen Appel (1921-2006) was a Dutch painter, sculptor and writer, from the Netherlands. He studied at the Rijksakademie in Amsterdam in the 1940s and was a part of the CoBrA movement. Greatly influenced by artists like Pablo Picasso and Matisse, he joined the CoBrA movement in 1948. Appel described painting “ like passion, is an emotion full of truth and rings a living sound, like the roar coming from the lion's breast,” and enjoyed abstract art and using expressive colors. He later died in Zurich Switzerland in 2006 and many of his pieces now belong to the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Art Institute of Chicago, National Gallery in Washington and more.
