Pierre Soulages Will Become the Latest Living Artist to Show at the Louvre This December—Just in Time for His 100th Birthday

This December, French painter
Pierre Soulages will celebrate his 100th birthday. He will also be
the subject of solo exhibition at the Louvre, making him one of a
handful of contemporary artists to show work in the famed
museum.

“Homage to Soulages,” which has
been organized by Pierre Encrevé, the art historian behind
Soulages’s catalogue raisonné, and Alfred Pacquement, the former
director of the Centre Pompidou, will cover every stage of the artist’s
seven-decade career from 1946 until today.

Special attention will be paid
to his dense polyptychs
from the late 1970s and ‘80s, as well as a number of large
paintings done in recent months. The show opens
on December 11, 2019
and will take over the
entirety of the museum’s Salon Carré, which normally shows 12th to
15th-century paintings.

With the exhibition, Soulages joins just a handful of
contemporary artists, including Anselm Kiefer, Cy Twombly,
and François Morellet, to present work at the Louvre.

Often regarded as one of
France’s greatest living artists, Soulages was born on December 24,
1919, in the southern part of the country. He settled in Paris
after World War II, and by the mid-‘50s had emerged as something of
an art star in Europe and the US, where he exhibited widely in
galleries and institutional group shows. 

Though he began working with
black paint early in his career, it wasn’t until the ‘70s that he
became synonymous with the color. In a 1979 exhibition at the
Centre Pompidou, he debuted a painting he called
Outrenoir, a French word that roughly translates to
“beyond black.”

Since then, he has devoted much
of his time to making
paintings with thick layers of black paint that absorb ambient
light to subtle, shifting effect. 

Known for his perfectionist
streak, Soulages makes his own tools and works in empty spaces to
avoid distractions. To this day, he will burn a canvas if he’s not
satisfied with it. “If it is mediocre, it goes,” he told AFP earlier
this year. 

Lévy Gorvy, one of Soulages’s
American galleries, will also open a solo show in New York
this week. Perrotin, who also represents the artist, will present
an exhibition of Soulages’s work at its Shanghai space in November. 

The post Pierre Soulages Will Become the Latest Living
Artist to Show at the Louvre This December—Just in Time for His
100th Birthday appeared first on artnet News.