In ‘Oiseau du soir’, Karel Appel reveals the spontaneous and expressive pictorial language that has defined his work since the years of the CoBrA movement. The composition is dominated by a stylized animal figure – a bird with exaggerated, almost childlike forms – emerging within a vibrant field of color. The intense areas of blue, red, yellow, and green create striking contrasts and give the painting an immediate visual energy. The large, accentuated eye becomes the focal point of the composition, reinforcing the raw and almost primitive character of the figure. As often in Appel’s work, the subject lies between figuration and abstraction: recognizable forms are deliberately simplified and distorted. This freedom of gesture, combined with a vivid and expressive palette, reflects the artist’s desire to recover the spontaneity and directness of a childlike visual language. Executed in 1973, the work belongs to the artist’s mature period, when his distinctive vocabulary of animal figures and bold colors reached a powerful expressive intensity.