Helene Appel, one of the most promising figures of contemporary art, was born in Karlsruhe in 1976. In 1998 she began her education at the Academy of Fine Arts in Hamburg as a fellow of the German National Academic Foundation. She then studied at the prestigious Royal College of Art in London for four terms (2004-2006) on a DAAD scholarship. Eventually Helene Appel settled in Berlin and pursues her artistic career.
In her deeply thoughtful and technically virtuosic works, Helene Appel opens new perspectives on everyday objects. She intentionally chooses "non-" motifs such as rice grains and, salad, fishing nets and tree branches which she represents in familiar plan view and in realistic proportions. Appel captures her objects with great precision, always highly realistic, but without imitating reality. Her pictures show rather pure, masterful painting that generates realism from genuine gestural abstract structures, gaining its peculiar tension from the contrast between familiar and unfamiliar features.
With her distinctive, both intellectually and aesthetically compelling paintings, Helene Appel has experienced great success in recent times. In 2011 she was awarded the Goslar Kaiser Ring Scholarship, accompanied by a solo exhibition at the Mönchhaus Museum Goslar. She also had solo shows in London ("Chopping Board", The Approach, 2010) and Berlin ("Advances", Luis Campaña, 2009). In addition, Helene Appel has shown her work at numerous international group exhibitions, most recently as part of "A Scene of Painting Today" in Prato (2013), "Object Fictions" in the New York James Cohan Gallery (2012), "Augentäuschung" (optical illusion) in the Kunsthalle Wilhelmshaven (2010) or "Beating The Bounds, Art Now" at the acclaimed London Tate Britain (2009).
Helene Appel lives and works in Berlin.