Spaightwood Galleries

Our Alechinsky pages are arranged thematically and/or by series. Clicking on a link will bring you to one or more pages on that subject.

Boxes / Central Park / Critters / Drawings / Faces / Grandes Marges / Hors Texte / Labyrinths / Landscapes
Screamers / Snakes / Transformations / Venice / Volcanoes

Alechinsky Specials

In the Chinese calendar, the Year of the Snake comes every twelve years. For Alechinsky, a founding member of COBRA (an acronym for the cities that contributed members to the group, Copenhagen, Brussels, and Amsterdam), the Year of the Snake can be an auspicious one. In 1977, also the Year of the Snake, Alechinsky was awarded the first Andrew W. Mellon Prize for Painting and executed one of the prints we are featuring, also called The Year of the Snake. In 1989, Alechinsky's Guggenheim retrospective which had been traveling in Europe for almost two years had finally come to its end, in 2001, we celebrated the Year of the Snake with a large show of Alechinsky's original prints and several drawings; in 2013, the Year of the Sanke will come again, but we have no intention of waiting until then. Only time will tellwhen, but time is whispering in our ears, why not in the fall of 2009 in a salute to Alechinsky's turning 81 (9x9, a number that probably has not significance whatsoever so far as Alechinsky is concerned). We are featuring lots of Alechinsky's favorite images: Central Park, snakes, volcanoes, gardens, dog-kings, smiling crocodiles and sea monsters, and people existing as best they can in a world that often seems to invite extreme emotional responses. (Sometimes you just want to scream!) Still, the central act of Alechinsky's art is the making of marks on a sheet of paper, on a canvas, on a copperplate, on a lithographic stone: for that is what distinguishes artists (visual or verbal) from destroyers. Alechinsky also seems fond of Venice. He was featured at the Belgium Pavillion in 1960 and created a set of etchings of dresses that reminded him of Venice, ranging from fin-de-siecle fashion, to Toulouse-Latrec's subjects' fashions, to Magritte-modeled clothing (the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice has two lovely Magritte paintings).