Pierre Alechinsky Belgian, b. 1927
"Alechinsky's work is a perpetual dialogue between the hand and the imagination — a universe teeming with hybrid creatures, calligraphic eruptions, and a joy of making that never diminishes."
Pierre Alechinsky (born 1927) is a Belgian painter, engraver, and writer, and one of the last living founders of the CoBrA movement. A central figure in post-war European abstraction, his work draws on primitive art, calligraphy, and cartoon imagery to create vibrant, labyrinthine compositions full of invented creatures and pictographic signs. He studied at La Cambre in Brussels and later in Paris and Japan, where he absorbed the practice of Japanese calligraphy. His work is held at the Centre Pompidou, the Tate Modern, the MoMA, and countless international institutions.
"Drawing is not what one sees but what one must make others see."
Pierre Alechinsky was born on 19 October 1927 in Brussels. He studied typographic arts and book illustration at La Cambre (École nationale supérieure des arts visuels) from 1944 to 1948, then settled in Paris. In 1949, he joined the CoBrA group — a European avant-garde collective named after the home cities of its founders: Copenhagen, Brussels, Amsterdam — and was among its most energetically prolific members before the group dissolved in 1951.
In 1955, Alechinsky travelled to Japan, where he studied Japanese calligraphy and made the documentary film Calligraphie japonaise. This encounter with Asian writing traditions deepened his own pictographic sensibility, leading him toward a style in which text, drawing, and painting are seamlessly intertwined. His compositions typically feature a large central image surrounded by a frieze of smaller drawings along the borders — a format inspired by medieval illuminated manuscripts and Asian scroll painting.
Through the 1960s and 1970s, Alechinsky developed a distinctive vocabulary of hybrid, anthropomorphic creatures — part human, part animal, part sign — that populate his canvases with restless, carnivalesque energy. He also worked extensively in engraving, lithography, and artist books. A close friend and collaborator of poets including Henri Michaux and Christian Dotremont, he has produced some of the most remarkable artist books in the post-war period.
Still working prolifically in his late nineties, Alechinsky received the Andrew W. Mellon Prize in 1994 and the Praemium Imperiale in 1997. His work is held in major collections worldwide.
Major exhibitions: Centre Pompidou, Paris (1998, retrospective); Guggenheim Museum, New York; Tate Modern, London; Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium, Brussels (2021).
Works in public collections: Centre Pompidou, Paris; Tate Modern, London; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium, Brussels; Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam.
Selected bibliography: Pierre Alechinsky, Poems and Paintings, Thames & Hudson, 1984; Jan Hoet, Alechinsky: Margins and Centres, Ludion, 1995.