“I love black, its authority, its depth, its clarity, its intransigence.” (Pierre Soulages)

Soulages’ crucial turn to the black colour happened in the 1950s, as he focussed systematically his canon of forms and colours on black. His works originate in an European sphere of redefinition and avantgarde, which is marked by influences from the American abstract expressionism, the informel up to Asian ink paintings.

The approach in the 1950s reveals Soulages’ intense confrontation with gesture and colour in a context of paradigmatic references to contemporary artists and friends including Hans Hartung, Sam Francis and Zao Wou-Ki.