Alechinsky, accompanying works

• Exhibition sale from December 5, 2019 to March 11, 2020

All his life he was close to books, he accompanied them unless they were them; in parallel with his work as a painter, he decorated the deluxe editions of the texts of the greatest authors, from Apollinaire to Proust, via Michel Butor or Salah Stétié. This exhibition offers the choice of Alechinsky who opens his collection to us: lithographs, prints, engravings, or etchings made to accompany the books in limited editions.

Pierre Alechinsky was born in 1927 in Brussels, he lives and works in Bougival and Maussane.

Unpredictable. Nonconformist. A freedom of inspiration and writing characterizes Alechinsky's work. For sixty years, he has explored the pleasure of creating in all directions, from painting to prints, from books to ceramics.

Trained at La Cambre in Brussels, Alechinsky joined the CoBrA group after meeting the poet Christian Dotremont in 1949. After his arrival in Paris in the early 1950s, he became friends with Alberto Giacometti, Bram van Velde, Walasse Ting. He began a correspondence with the Japanese calligrapher Shiryu Morita from Kyoto and became interested in Japanese calligraphy, which would have a lasting influence on his work.

Graphic work will always hold a special place in his artistic expression. Passionate about books, he illustrates poems and texts (Cioran, Michel Butor, Yves Bonnefoy, André Frénaud, Jean Tardieu, etc.) and publishes numerous works: "I am a painter who comes from printing".

He is the winner of the Praemium Imperiale Prize, Tokyo, 2018.

"When my brush wanders over the pages of an old atlas and, at the bend of a border, it falls, like the old walker that it is, on the outline of a curve that could closely or distantly resemble a dress, a head of hair, there is nothing left to do but let yourself go. It is not work, it is daydreaming that trots." Pierre Alechinsky