Alisan Fine Arts – Pierre Soulages – Beyond Black

Alisan Fine Arts is proud to present our first ever solo exhibition for Pierre Soulages in Hong Kong as part of The French May Arts Festival celebrating Soulages’ 100th Anniversary. The painter and sculptor Pierre Soulages is one of France’s most important artists, with an impressive career spanning over seven decades. He is known as a master of post-war abstraction, leader of Tachisme (the French counterpart to Action painting in the United States), and ‘the painter of black’, owing to the hue’s unique properties as both a color and a non-color, and ability to represent the natural, opposing forces of order and disorder. Soulages has said, ‘My instrument is not black but the light reflected from the black.’ He sees light as a work material that reflects off of the ridges and textures of the blackness, allowing the black to emerge from its color-void as a glossy and dynamic ‘color’ composed of organized light.

Pierre Soulages was born in Rodez, France in 1919 and began to paint while a teenager. At the age of eighteen, he traveled to Paris to familiarize himself with the art scene and found inspiration in Picasso and Cezanne. During the years of World War II, he frequented the École des Beaux-Arts in Montpellier, although not formally enrolled as a student. In 1946 he moved to Courbevoie, outside Paris, where he set up a studio and began producing abstract works characterized by heavy black brush strokes. From the beginning, he entitled his works simply Peinture, together with the dimensions and the exact dating of the respective work. He befriended other artists—including Hans Hartung, Francis Picabia, and Fernand Léger—and had his first exhibition at the Salon des Surindépendants in 1947. Just one year later, the work of the young artist was discovered in Germany. Participation in the 1948 seminal group exhibition Französische abstrakte Malerei was Soulages’ first exhibition abroad, traveling to seven cities throughout Germany. In the same year, James Johnson Sweeney, former curator of the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) and later director of the Guggenheim Museum in New York, became aware of the artist. The international recognition accorded to Soulages during this creative period is further reflected in his three appearances at Documenta: I (1955), II (1959) and III (1964).

Since 1979, the artist has been concerned exclusively with a series of mainly monochrome paintings he as defined as Outrenoirs (translated ‘beyond black’), known for their effect of bottomless depth created by the interplay of texture and light. Soulages applies various layers of paint, then manipulates the tarry surface into furrows and planes through the use of self-made tools, including brushes, rollers and spatulas, and objects such as spoons and bits of rubber. In recent years he has shifted his focus on the interplay between regions of glossy and matte, exploring the densities and hardness of pigments within the spectrum of black.

A highlight of Soulages’ extensive exhibition history was the retrospective held by the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris in 2009 held in honor of the artist’s 90th birthday. Today, his works are featured in the collections of more than 300 international museums, including the MoMA in New York, the Tate in London and the National Gallery of Art in Washington D.C. In 2014, the Musée Soulages opened in his hometown of Rodez. The artist currently lives and works in Paris and Sète, France.

About the gallery

Alisan Fine Arts, founded in 1981, is one of the first professionally run galleries in Hong Kong. Over the years it has organized more than 100 exhibitions for Chinese artists living around the world. Through these exhibitions and other events, Alisan has brought to Hong Kong and other parts of Asia established international Chinese artists, including Zao Wouki, Chu Teh Chun and Gao Xingjian (France), Chao Chung Hsiang, John Way and Fay Ming (USA), Walasse Ting (Netherlands) and Hsiao Chin (Italy). In 1987 the gallery began promoting Chinese artists from the mainland.