After having worked for 32 years as painting conservator and researcher at the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, where she has been involved in the conservation of works by Malevich, Mondriaan, Barnett Newman, Jasper Johns, Jackson Pollock as well as works by CoBrA artists, and in particular by Karel Appel, Louise Wijnberg is since 2022 an independent conservator. She has done work for the RCE and, more recently, collaborated with the Karel Appel Foundation to assess the conservation state of the huge Karel Appel painting at the UNESCO headquarters in Paris.

A closer look at the paintings of Karel Appel in the Collection of the Boijmans Van Beuningen: “Materials and Painting Techniques”

Within the framework of Cultural Heritage Agency of the Netherlands’ program dedicated to the research of the surfaces of paintings by Karel Appel, Louise Wijnberg had examined all Appel paintings belonging to the collection of Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, focusing on Appel’s studio practice and assessing his use of materials, techniques and their conservation state. Through archival research, she contextualized her findings with respect to different local particularities like the changing origin of material he used. In her presentation she gave a condensed summary of the state of her research.