In the Chinese calendar, the Year of the Snake comes every twelve years. For Pierre 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. Spaightwood Galleries began in 1980, so we missed our 1977 observance, but by 1989, Alechinsky's Guggenheim retrospective (which had been traveling in Europe for almost two years) had finally come to its end, and Spaightwood presented our first major Alechinsky show and purchased a small oil painting on canvas by the artist. In 2001, we once again celebrated the Year of the Snake with an Alechinsky show, founded upon our acquisition of large numbers of the two pieces published in 1977 to celebrate his Mellon prize and augmented by many more recent etchings and lithographs published by Galerie Lelong. Now, in 2013, as the Year of the Snake winds down to its close no sooner than mid-April, we are presenting our largest Alechinsky show to date. In our Upton space, we can fit more Alechinsky’s on the walls than ever before—97 on the walls (some of them quite large) and more leaning against the bookshelves beneath the walls where the others are hanging—and we plan to luxuriate in lots of Alechinsky's favorite images: maps, Papiers traités, 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!) 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.

Maps often play a featured role in Alechinsky's works. In life, maps tell us how to get to where we want to go; in Alechinsky's art, however, they are often a symbol of order that must be destroyed if there is to be any freedom.