Alechinsky, Pierre

Pierre Alechinsky is an important Belgian artist with a distinctive personal style that he found early. His ouevre oscillates between surrealism and expressionism. Each of his paintings is an explosion of color that delights with complex line structures and often wit. His artistic training began in 1944 at the National School of Visual Arts in La Cambre (Brussels, Belgium), where he studied traditional artistic techniques. During his studies, he discovered the works of surrealist painters Michaux and Dubuffet.
 

Not far from there, his paintings and prints open the door to a very personal universe. With the CoBrA group, founded in 1948, he shared his views on aesthetics and participated in their events with prominent artists such as Corneille, Asger Jorn and Karel Appel. Alechinsky was very committed to the success of CoBrA and organized many exhibitions for the group. His personal values generally tend towards a rejection of abstraction, towards free and spontaneous figuration.
 

His work is characterized by compositions framed by a tangle of black lines, which appear decorative and lyrical. For his printmaking work, he reinvented the techniques of lithography and etching. Thus, etching is suitable for any kind of dotted lines, while lithography, as meek as it appears, most often enters the service of Alechinsky's recurring motifs. Today he ranks among the most important artists of the 20th century. His works can be seen in prestigious museums such as the Albertina in Vienna, the Museum of Fine Arts in Belgium, the Metropolitan Museum and the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York. Hundreds of his prints are kept at the Centre de la gravure de La Louvière in Belgium.