Pierre Alechinsky

Pierre Alechinsky was born in Brussels on 19 October 1927. He studied typography and book illustration at La Cambre in Brussels from 1944 to 1948, joined the CoBrA movement in 1949, and has lived and worked in France since 1951. Over the decades that followed, he developed a practice spanning painting, works on paper, and an exceptionally rich engagement with printmaking — lithography, etching, woodcut, linocut, and illustrated-book prints among them — that has placed him among the most widely exhibited European artists of his generation.

Alechinsky's relationship with print is central to understanding the full scope of his work. A catalogue raisonné of his graphic output covering 1946 to 1972 documents the breadth of this engagement, and a print retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1981 brought together nearly 950 works across various print media. His prints and illustrated books entered the permanent collections of MoMA and the National Library of France, where a dedicated exhibition, Les impressions, was held in 2005. The Museum of Fine Arts of Bordeaux presented Alechinsky à l'imprimerie in 1977, and the Center for Engraving and Printed Images in La Louvière mounted two solo exhibitions — 50 ans d'imprimerie in 2000 and Les Palimpsestes in 2017 — devoted to this dimension of his practice.

His exhibition history extends across continents and institutions of the first rank. Solo presentations have taken place at the Centre Pompidou in Paris in both 1978 and 2004, at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York in 1987, at the Kunsthaus Zürich in 1975, at the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Humlebæk in 1969, and at the Royal Museum of Fine Arts of Belgium in Brussels in 2008. He participated in documenta 6 in Kassel in 1977 and in the São Paulo Biennale in 1959. His earliest recorded group exhibition dates to 1948 at Apollo Gallery in Brussels, and his first solo institutional presentation in London, Choses sur papier, was held at the ICA in 1958. Galerie Lelong & Co. in Paris has represented him as his primary gallery since 1979, with an unbroken sequence of solo exhibitions continuing through 2025, when Ne fêter ni l'an ni la vitesse opened there. Galerie Bordas in Venice has maintained an active relationship with the artist across five exhibitions since 2004, the most recent in 2024.

In 2025, the Musée-bibliothèque Pierre André Benoit in Alès, France, opened Alechinsky sur papier, an exhibition running through 4 January 2026 and accompanied by a catalogue documenting approximately 200 works drawn from eight decades of production — a survey that underscores the sustained continuity and range of a practice still actively unfolding.