Southpaw: Gerasimos Floratos & Karel Appel

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On Influence and Meaning | Franz W. Kaiser

The story of this exhibition started when we, Harriet Appel and I, first met Gerasimos Floratos at the opening of his show Hymn at the Château de Boisgeloup, France, in October 2022. Both Floratos and Appel had recently been added to the roster of Almine Rech. We didn’t know him yet and we were intrigued by some sort of aesthetic affinity with Karel Appel that we meant to recognize in a little sculpture that featured on the invitation card. 

And when we met, Gerasimos confirmed that Appel was a major inspiration for him. A year later, he came up with the proposal of a dialogue to be staged at the Tribeca space of the Almine Rech – a proposal that we happily agreed to.

There is a gap of three generations between Karel Appel and Gerasimos Floratos, but a closer look into their respective biographies and preoccupations reveals some analogies:

           A transatlantic identity: Born in Amsterdam in 1921, Appel left The Netherlands for good in 1950 to settle in Paris, and from 1957 onwards he shared his time between Europe and the US. Born in New York in 1986 from Greek immigrants, Floratos is a Manhattan kid with a Greek name, and since 2017 he shares his time between Manhattan and the Greek island Kefalonia, where his family originates.

          An anti-academic attitude: Florates is self-taught and he has curated an exhibition featuring Outsider Artists. Whereas Appel did spend two years at the Amsterdam Art Academy, the development of his pictorial language drew in large part from children’s drawings and from Outsider Art.

           Both their artistic idioms are ostensibly non-modernist. They gather inspiration from popular culture, without however transferring it one to one, as postmodern artists tend to do.
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— Franz W. Kaiser, Karel Appel Foundation