Karel Stoop has been born in 1951 in -Made en Drimmelen- a small village
situated in the south of The Netherlands.
His earliest memories have been always -and even now- an important inspiration
for him. The smell of the garden after a rainy day. The ice on the windows in winter.
The sounds in the street and specially the moments of looking at the stars.
The stars that made him feel like falling upwards, like having the intuition that they
were his remote origin and to there he would return one day.
After his academic degree in 1976 he started travelling and in fact from that moment
he never stopped travelling. He made journeys to the Middle East, Marocco, Greece
and later to New York, Beijing , Shanghai and Istanbul.
He worked for long periods in Ibiza, the south of Spain and Barcelona where he met
artists like Antoni Tapies, Louise Bourgeois and Karel Appel.
His first exhibitions were in places like Huesca, Mataro, Badalona and after Barcelona,
Bilbao, New York, Amsterdam, London, Beijing, Tokyo and Shanghai.
Actually he has his studio in a small village near Tárrega ( Spain) and works also for
periods in Amsterdam.