Pierre Skira

Pierre Skira (1938–2025) was a French painter and pastellist whose work moved between abstraction and figuration across a career of more than sixty years. Best known for his richly worked pastels, he explored still life, books, musical instruments and, in later years, increasingly abstract relationships of colour, form and space.

Born in Paris, Skira was the son of the celebrated art publisher Albert Skira, whose friendships with many of the leading artists of the twentieth century gave his son an extraordinary early introduction to modern art. As a child, Pierre accompanied his father on visits to Henri Matisse, watching him work on the celebrated paper cut-outs of his final years. Through his father’s circle he also met Alberto Giacometti and Balthus.

At the age of twelve, Skira’s parents sent him to spend the summer with Pablo Picasso in the south of France, an exceptional experience that brought him into direct contact with one of the defining figures of modern art at a formative age.

In 1954 Skira became a typographical apprentice in Switzerland, an experience that fostered a lifelong fascination with books, paper and the physical qualities of printed material. Two years later he moved to Paris and began painting within a circle of writers and artists. His early work was abstract, influenced by artists including Franz Kline, Emilio Vedova and Piet Mondrian, before he increasingly turned towards figuration.

Books became one of his most enduring subjects. Arranged in stacks, opened, closed or seen edge-on, they allowed Skira to explore structure, surface and light while drawing on the tradition of seventeenth-century still-life painting. His first exhibition took place in Paris in 1962, followed by his first solo exhibition two years later, at the time of the emergence of New Figuration. In 1967 he received the Prix de la Biennale de Paris.

In 1975 Skira abandoned oil painting in favour of dry pastel, which remained central to his work thereafter. Using particularly high-quality pastels, notably those made by Roché in Paris, he developed dense, velvety surfaces in which colour could be built up, overlaid and subtly modulated.

Over time his subjects expanded from books to musical instruments, vanitas compositions and increasingly abstract arrangements. In his later work, recognisable objects often disappeared altogether, leaving fields of colour and geometric or organic forms separated by areas of white space. Throughout, his work remained concerned with the relationships between colour, form, surface and space.

Skira also maintained close connections with literature and philosophy, collaborating with writers and thinkers including Pascal Quignard, Jean-François Lyotard, Patrick Mauriès and Gérard Macé. His parallel interests in painting, typography and the book remained closely intertwined throughout his career.

The Redfern Gallery presented two major solo exhibitions of Skira’s work, Pierre Skira: New Pastels in 2016 and a further exhibition of new work in 2019. The 2016 exhibition was accompanied by a substantial Redfern publication with an essay by Michael Peppiatt.

In 2022–23 the Musée Picasso, Antibes, presented Pierre Skira: Les façons d’être du pastel, bringing together large-scale pastels and engravings made over the preceding two decades. The exhibition marked an important recognition of his later work, and works by Skira subsequently entered the collection of the Musée Picasso.

Skira died in 2025. His work is held in important French public collections including the Musée National d’Art Moderne, Centre Pompidou, the Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris, the Palais de l’Élysée and the Musée Picasso, Antibes.