Pierre Alechinsky and Karel Appel have known each other since 1949 and their CoBrA years. These artists from Copenhagen, Brussels and Amsterdam enjoyed the emulation of works produced in collaboration, often combining poems, drawings and paintings. Appel and Alechinsky had each notably worked with Christian Dotremont, but it wasn’t until 1976 that they found themselves together in Pierre Alechinsky’s studio in Bougival, outskirts of Paris to embark on a series of ink works with two brushes.
They established some basic principles: white plus the black of India Ink, the paper would be on the floor, one would start and the other would riposte…

The set of works from 1976 was shown successively at the Galerie de France in Paris, the Fondation Maeght in Saint-Paul de Vence, at the Louisiana Museum in Copenhagen…
This exhibition invites us to rediscover a number of these works, which also shows coloured paintings produced by Alechinsky and Appel in the same period, along with the “two brushes” paintings.