Pierre Soulages
Pierre Soulages ( born December 24, 1919 in Rodez, Aveyron ) is a French painter and printmaker.
He is next to Hans Hartung main representatives of abstract non-representational direction of contemporary French painting; typical of his compositions are wide, black bars shapes against a light background.
Life
The son of a carriage maker lost his father at age five. During World War II he eluded the recruitment for forced labor in Germany with false papers as wine in Montpellier. After the war, he moved in 1946 to Paris, and now entirely devoted to painting, he was regarded as a European counterweight to the American " abstract expressionist " to Franz Kline and Jackson Pollock, whose " Action Painting " his own black and white imagery however, differ significantly. In 1948 he was discovered by the artists Hans Hartung and Francis Picabia in Paris. His black, kalligraphiehaften forms quickly became his trademark. From 1949 to 1952 he worked as a set designer for the Théâtre de l' Athénée in Paris. Since 1979, his paintings are monochrome black. Soulages took part in documenta 1 (1955), Documenta II (1959) and also the documenta III in Kassel in 1964. In 1992 he received the " Praemium Imperiale ", a sort of Nobel Prize for Art. Soulages lives with his wife Colette in Paris and Sète in southern France. In February 2014 it was announced that he had a collection of 500 works of his hometown of Rodez. In May 2014 it should have its own museum in the city.
Work
Pierre Soulages ' art is characterized by the desire of not wanting to portray, but to be simply not to represent, but only to present. Based on characters in which it is less in the predefined connotations of calligraphy of the Far East is used as in the mythical sign on monuments of his Celtic homeland, he developed in a pursuit of nonfigurativer representation of a highly intuitive painting, whose deeper meaning to the extent by the act viewing opens. Soulages artistic creation is not to be understood as an illustration of the states of mind of the artist in random splashes of color. Rather, he deliberately builds complex compositions, not least to help make his works clearly distinguish them from other non- representational artists working, in particular the North American art scene. Its partly unusual tools include not only coarse brushes, brooms and wooden poles, the so-called lames (rubber pieces between two wooden discs clamped ), through which the surface can make diverse. The preferred color black with these agents produces grooves and furrows, which leaves the underlying black layer of paint colors glow more intensely. In other Soulages developed from his Outrenoir images, in which he shows the behavior of the reflections of light on black when they meet on the machined surface. So it is clear that the artist attempted to portray the light does not, but rather involves the natural light as an elementary part in its work. The changing light conditions and View Points bear finally to the fact that Soulages works can never be "seen to the end ", but always remain alive and inexhaustible.