Home > Current events > PIERRE ALECHINSKY LES PALIMPSESTES

PIERRE ALECHINSKY
LES PALIMPSESTES

FROM 3 JUNE TO 5 NOVEMBER 2017


300 artworks - paintings, drawings, prints, books of Pierre Alechinsky

Alechinky © André Morain 1986

  

CENTRE DE LA GRAVURE ET DE L'IMAGE IMPRIMÉE

10, rue des Amours
7100 La Louvière
BELGIUM

INFORMATION:

• Phone: +32 (0) 64 27 87 27
• Website: www.centredelagravure.be
• Mail: accueil@centredelagravure.be

OPENING TIMES:

• Tuesday to Sunday
• From 10 AM to 6 PM

ADMISSION PRICE:

• €7/6/5/3
• Free for children under 12
• Free on the first Sunday of each month

CURATOR

Catherine de Braekeleer, director, Centre de la Gravure et de l’Image imprimée

CONTACTS:

• Julie Scouflaire
Phone: +32 (0) 64 27 87 22
js@centredelagravure.be
• Bénédicte du Bois d'Enghien
Phone: +32 (0) 64 27 87 25
bdbd@centredelagravure.be


This exhibition of almost 300 artworks - paintings, drawings, prints, books - will highlight an unusual aspect of the work of this passionate printing art amateur. For more than 60 years, Pierre Alechinsky (born in Brussels in 1927) has been collecting all kinds of documents with a very diverse history. This artist, skimming flea markets and archive funds, is diverting old hand-written letters, commercial letters with headings, invoices, old geographic maps and city maps from their original use, in order to integrate them - with extraordinary freedom - in his own creations. By making prints of sewage covers (the so-called 'manholes') in the streets of Arles, Brussels, Liège, New York, Beijing, Rome and Salzburg, he has also given new life to very modest pieces of urban furniture.

In 2000, the Centre for engravings presented 'Pierre Alechinsky. 50 ans d’imprimerie'. Today, on the eve of his 90th birthday, we have asked him to highlight his palimpsests in La Louvière.


The catalogue published on the occasion of this exhibition contains an inventory widely annotated by the artist with all the types of palimpsests he has been experiencing since the end of the 40s. An unusual text written by Yves Peyré highlights this very particular approach.

The exhibition focuses on highlighting the typology created by the artist according to three themes deployed on the three floors of the museum. The works are thus grouped by headings to resonate with the detailed inventory of the artist.
• Prints
• Works on manuscripts and printed matter
• Prints and paintings on maps.
The posters form a fourth theme also dealt with in the catalogue.

Each floor has its regroupings and its nomenclature, from music to protest letters, from writing exercises to schoolboy notebooks, to maps. The ground floor really does take us to the ground with prints of sewage covers from the streets of Arles, Brussels, Beijing, Rome. The first floor, like a cabinet of curiosities, brings together many manuscripts, prints and books. On the second floor, with the geographical maps we are, like a surveyor, in the midst of the world. From the ground to the sky, through these documents of very diverse origins, the curious and moping spirit of the artist blends history and present efflorescences.

PUBLICATION:
• Catalogue in French: 160 pages, 280 original notices by Pierre Alechinsky. Foreword by de Braekeleer, text by Yves Peyré. Silvana Editoriale and Centre de la Gravure et de l’Image imprimée, €20.