Alechinsky

Pierre Alechinsky (born in 1927 in Schaerbeek, Brussels) is one of the major figures of the post-war European avant-garde. Painter and printmaker, he developed a highly coherent body of work, based on the articulation of gesture, color, writing and image. Trained at the École Nationale Supérieure d'Architecture et des Arts Visuels in La Cambre between 1944 and 1948, he studied illustration, typography and printing techniques that have a lasting impact on his practice, from artist books to painting on paper.

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In 1949, he joined Christian Dotremont and the founding artists of the CoBrA movement. This founding experience places him in a conception of creation based on the spontaneity, energy and freedom of the sign. For Alechinsky, drawing and material cease to be descriptive to become vectors of intensity, affirming a painting of movement and momentum.

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From the beginning of the 1950s, Alechinsky became a permanent part of the Parisian scene and developed a practice where painting and graphic arts influenced each other. His work is structured around the relationship to the medium, to the fluidity of ink and to the circulation of the image, extending a reflection on the sign as an active trace rather than as a fixed form. The trip to Japan in 1955 was a decisive moment. In charge of creating the images for a film devoted to Japanese calligraphy, Alechinsky deepened his understanding of gesture, speed of execution and concentration.

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Alechinsky develops characteristic compositions in which the central image dialogues with margins, frames and graphic extensions. This structure, inherited from both print and drawing, creates a stratified pictorial space, combining fragmentary narration, humor, memory, and gestural energy.

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His work is now present in international institutional collections, in particular at the Pompidou Center in Paris and at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum.

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In 2007, on the occasion of its 80th anniversary, a exceptional retrospective was presented by the Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium in Brussels, highlighting the importance of its contribution to the history of art. The institution also organized the exhibition in 2021 Carta Canta in order to allow the public to discover the importance of drawing in the painter's work.

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