Spaightwood Galleries

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, the Year of the Snake came around again (though for Alechinsky it actually never goes very far away in any case) and we celebrated with a large one-person show of his prints (and several drawings). In 2013, it will come again, but we cannot wait. In the fall of 2009, we will be featuring lots of Alechinsky's favorite images: Central Park, Venice, labyrinths, volcanoes, gardens, dog-kings, smiling crocodiles and sea monsters, snakes, various other kinds of critters, and people existing as best they can in a world that often seems to invite extreme emotional responses. (What do you do when the world is too much with you? Sometimes you just want to scream!)