The city council of his birthplace in southern France, Rodez, announced this on Wednesday. Soulages left posterity with an extensive body of work, which would consist of more than 1500 paintings and several hundred graphic works.
His minimalist, gestural paintings in black brought Soulages international fame early on. In 1948 his compositions were shown at the first exhibition of French painters in Germany. In 1955 he took part in the first documenta in Kassel and his first retrospectives in international museums took place in the 1960s.
While he initially used the color black to express the light effect of white and other colors, from 1979 he started to cover the canvas completely with black and use the color to reflect the light. Oversized triptychs and polyptychs were created in which the structure of the thickly applied black color paste modulates the light.
“Outrenoir”, beyond black, he called these compositions, which have defined his work ever since. It’s not just black paint, it’s light he paints with, Soulages once told the German news agency. In this way he made light an integral part of his work.
Soulages was born on December 24, 1919 in Rodez in the south of France, the son of a coachbuilder. During his lifetime, he left over 500 works to his hometown, some of which can be seen today at the Soulages Museum, which opened in 2014.
(SDA)