Pierre Skira was born in Paris to well-known Swiss art dealer and publisher Albert Skira. The younger Skira’s wartime childhood made for a peripatetic early life moving between the Alps, Geneva, the South of France and Paris. Along the way, he encountered some of the greatest names in art, such as Henri Matisse at the time the latter was working on his famous cut-outs, and Pablo Picasso, with whom Skira’s family stayed in the south of France.
While Skira was greatly influenced by Franz Kline, Emilio Verona and Piet Mondrian, he abandoned an early interest in abstraction in the 1960s to moved on to what was then called New Figuration.
Skira started exhibiting his work – in group shows, at first – in 1962. His first solo show would come two years later. In 1967, he won the Prix de la Biennale de Paris. While he may have started his art career working with oils, he moved on to pastels in 1975. Later in his career, he became particularly drawn to painting detailed studies of books in the manner of 17th-century art, as seen in the work ECKART ASIA acquired.
Skira has shown his work all over Europe, including at the Redfern Gallery in London in 2016 and 2019, and at the Picasso Museum in Antibes in 2022. His work is held in many important public collections, including that of the Musée National d’Art Moderne and the Palais de l’Élysée in Paris.
