Guillaume Corneille

Dutch, 1922 - 2010

http://www.artnet.com/artists/corneille/

Guillaume Corneille (1922- 2010) concentrated in drawing at the Academy of Art in Amsterdam, Holland from 1940–1943. In 1948, he helped to found COBRA (an acronym for Copenhagen, Brussels, and Amsterdam), a group of young artists from those cities who shared expressionistic sensibilities. Although he received some formal training, Corneille is basically a self-taught painter whose work reveals the uninhibited energy and love of vibrant color that is typical of the work of COBRA artists. This series of lithographs combines expressionistic line and background color with naturalistic forms of birds and humans that creep into existence from the edges of the image or emerge from the background, with only a contrasting contour line to divide the two worlds. This almost-childlike fusion brings our senses to attention and heightens our awareness of the possibilities that exist within our world to create alternate realities.