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Lot Essay
Theo Wolvecamp was the odd man out within CoBrA. Coming from the Twente region (the east of the Netherlands), he lacked the bravura of his colleagues Appel, Constant and Corneille. Although he was very much appreciated by his Amsterdam contemporaries, in the early 1950's he never completely felt at home in Amsterdam. In 1953, his effort to further develop his work in Paris came to a naught - he was miserable there. Wolvecamp proved unable to work without the familiar décor of his youth and moved back to Hengelo permanently in 1954.
Wolvecamp also shunned publicity, feeling more comfortable in the shadows of the art world, throughout his career, and long after the break up of CoBrA, Wolvecamp stayed loyal to the artistic principles of experiment and improvisation. Therefore he is often referred to as the 'silent force behind CoBrA'.
Using Kandinsky's abstraction as a point of departure in his early career a great influence on his work must have been the 1958 exhibition 'Jong Amerika schildert' organized at The Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, it showed the Abstract expressionism of amongst others William Baziotes, Sam Francis, Adolph Gottlieb, Philip Guston, Willem de Kooning, Robert Motherwell, Mark Rothko, Barnett Newman, Jackson Pollock and Arshile Gorky. Wolvecamp admits having experienced the influence of Gorky and Pollock's early works by stating: 'These painters belong to my instinctive world as well. What Pollock did was lending improvisation a hand.' (Ed Wingen, Wolvecamp, Venlo 1990, p. 78)
In Gorky's art of painting Wolvecamp recognises his own attitude of always reworking a piece, never finishing it, rearranging it an being more interested in the process than the final result. In 1967 Wolvecamp surprises the Dutch art world with his work at Galerie Krikhaar in Amsterdam. For well over ten years Wolvecamp did not have a solo exhibition, and only rarely participated in group exhibitions. The works from this period are breaking away from Appel's barbarism or Jorn's mythology but show spacious form and a markedly thin treatment of paint. The double date '65-67' on the reverse of the present lot shows that Wolvecamp must have reworked the piece two years after starting on it, possibly just before the Krikhaar exhibition.
The works in the exhibition were very well received. Lambert Tegenbosch writes in De Volkskrant:'Amongst the (fast) CoBrA-painters Theo Wolvecamp is a remarkably slow one, his maturation, his weight and calibre are, years after CoBrA became history, a surprise hardly to expected anymore.'
Wolvecamp also shunned publicity, feeling more comfortable in the shadows of the art world, throughout his career, and long after the break up of CoBrA, Wolvecamp stayed loyal to the artistic principles of experiment and improvisation. Therefore he is often referred to as the 'silent force behind CoBrA'.
Using Kandinsky's abstraction as a point of departure in his early career a great influence on his work must have been the 1958 exhibition 'Jong Amerika schildert' organized at The Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, it showed the Abstract expressionism of amongst others William Baziotes, Sam Francis, Adolph Gottlieb, Philip Guston, Willem de Kooning, Robert Motherwell, Mark Rothko, Barnett Newman, Jackson Pollock and Arshile Gorky. Wolvecamp admits having experienced the influence of Gorky and Pollock's early works by stating: 'These painters belong to my instinctive world as well. What Pollock did was lending improvisation a hand.' (Ed Wingen, Wolvecamp, Venlo 1990, p. 78)
In Gorky's art of painting Wolvecamp recognises his own attitude of always reworking a piece, never finishing it, rearranging it an being more interested in the process than the final result. In 1967 Wolvecamp surprises the Dutch art world with his work at Galerie Krikhaar in Amsterdam. For well over ten years Wolvecamp did not have a solo exhibition, and only rarely participated in group exhibitions. The works from this period are breaking away from Appel's barbarism or Jorn's mythology but show spacious form and a markedly thin treatment of paint. The double date '65-67' on the reverse of the present lot shows that Wolvecamp must have reworked the piece two years after starting on it, possibly just before the Krikhaar exhibition.
The works in the exhibition were very well received. Lambert Tegenbosch writes in De Volkskrant:'Amongst the (fast) CoBrA-painters Theo Wolvecamp is a remarkably slow one, his maturation, his weight and calibre are, years after CoBrA became history, a surprise hardly to expected anymore.'