Lévy Gorvy Dayan is pleased to announce Pierre Soulages: Paintings on Paper, which will feature more than twenty of the French artist’s works on paper, the majority of which have never been exhibited before. We are honored to collaborate on this presentation with the artist’s widow, Colette Soulages, to reveal the importance of the medium to Pierre Soulages’s groundbreaking oeuvre.

Paintings on Paper marks the sixth solo exhibition of Soulages’s work presented by Dominique Lévy during her decades-long relationship with the artist and his estate. The medium of paper is foundational to Soulages’s artistic practice, dating back to the mid-1940s. Paper was his first support, and he evolved his body of paintings on paper alongside and independently to his canvases; the paper works often anticipating developments he would bring to his oil compositions. Arguably, the artist’s works on paper are the purest form of his painterly expression. Rendered in walnut stain, gouache, and ink, they express his unconstrained creativity. Unlike his canvases, Soulages did not need to determine the format of his paintings on paper in advance and wait for a stretcher to be prepared. Instead, on the paper support, he could immediately capture his, in his words, “inner imperative.” Further, Soulages gravitated to the swift rhythm of working on paper; the fluidity of his pigments and the absorptive nature of his support requiring rapid decision-making and denying opportunities for changes or corrections.