Pierre Soulages

The Choice of Painting

Tessé Museum, Le Mans

The Tessé Museum is presenting the exhibition “The Choice of Painting, Another History of Abstraction, 1962-1989” from February 10th to June 9th, 2024. It offers a panorama of three decades of abstract painting in France, from the 1960s to the 1980s.

How did artists kept on painting when the trend, starting from the 1960s, gazed towards pop art, non-art, conceptual art, or minimalism? Through about sixty works, the exhibition explores this interrogation by reflecting the diversity of new pictorial approaches based on a different conception of gesture, the role of colour, and the notion of painting.

Victor Vanoosten, exhibition curator

Musée de Tessé
2 avenue de Paderborn
72000 Le Mans
Tél. 02 43 47 38 51

Free Admission
Hours: Tuesday to Sunday, 10 a.m. to 12:30 p.m. and 2 p.m. to 6 p.m.
Catalogue: THE CHOICE OF PAINTING Another history of abstraction in France 1962-1989.

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VASARELY BEFORE THE OP: European abstraction, 1945-1955

Fondation Vasarely, Aix-En-Provence

The Vasarely Foundation continues its partnership with the Centre Pompidou, Musée national d’art moderne-Centre de création industrielle for the 4th consecutive year, with the summer exhibition “Vasarely avant l’Op, une abstraction européenne, 1945-1955”. From June 17 to October 15, 2023, a selection of 35 major works on loan from the Paris museum, the Musée départemental Matisse, the Musée d’art moderne de la ville de Paris, the Hartung-Bergman Foundation, the Marta Pan Foundation, the Denise René Gallery and private collections will be presented in Aix-en-Provence, at the Vasarely Foundation for four months.

Exhibition with works by Agam, Jean-Michel Atlan, André Bloc, Simone Boisecq, Robert Breer, Geneviève Claisse, Jean Dewasne, Jean Deyrolle, Cesar Domela, Etienne Gilioli, Hans Hartung, Auguste Herbin, Robert Jacobsen, Berto Lardera, Alberto Magnelli, Richard Mortensen, Pablo Palazuelo, Marta Pan, Ideo Pantaleoni, Alicia Penalba, Edgar Pillet, Serge Poliakoff, Gérard Schneider, Pierre Soulages, Victor Vasarely and Nicolaas Warb.

Curator of the exhibition: Michel Gauthier

An exhibition in partnership with the Musée National d’Art Moderne Centre Pompidou

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At the heart of Abstraction Works from the collection of the Fondation Gandur pour l’Art

Fondation Maeght

The exhibition at the Fondation Maeght will show works from the collection of the Fondation Gandur pour l’Art from the 2nd of July until the 20th of November 2022 and offers an immersion in the vibrant creation of the years 1945 to 1980.

Home to a collection of more than 13,000 works, Fondation Maeght is always keen and honoured to showcase other collections, some of which are rarely accessible to the public, as it has consistently done in the past. This summer, from 2 July to 20 November, it is unveiling some 120 works from the Fondation Gandur pour l’Art (Geneva) and offering a riveting immersion into abstraction from the 1950s to the 1980s.

In the wake of Second World War, as many European artists exiled in the United States headed back to France, Paris regained its status as a hotbed of creativity and a global cultural capital. Driven by a thirst for freedom and a craving to rethink painting in the post-war years, artists from all over the world returned to their studios, abandoned during the German occupation, and engaged in an era of creative effervescence, be it in the arts, literature or filmmaking. While the breakthroughs by the vanguards of the first half of the 20th century were an invaluable post-war stimulus, abstract art renewed itself from the most gestural expression to the interrogation of materials, mediums and techniques.

The Fondation Gandur pour l’Art’s outstanding collection displayed at Fondation Maeght reveals the variety of forms em- braced by abstraction during these creative years. Works by Hans Hartung, Martin Barré, Simon Hantaï or Pierre Soulag- es trace the evolution of non-figurative art over four decades. In a thematic and chronological layout, the exhibition invites the viewer to discover lyrical and gestural abstraction by Georges Mathieu, abstract expressionism by Sam Francis and Joan Mitchell, geometric abstraction by Victor Vasarely, kinetic works by Alexander Calder and Jean Tinguely, through to the rethinking of painting by the Supports/Surfaces group. The 1980s ushered in an era of revitalized abstract art, building on the hectic experimentation of earlier years.

Guest curator: Yan Schubert, the Gandur Collection pour l’Art curato

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La luce nel nero

Fondazione Palazzo Albizzini Collezione Burri

“La Luce del Nero” is the title of the upcoming exhibition hosted in one of the two museums of Fondazione Burri, the Ex Seccatoi del Tabacco in Città di Castello, Italy. Here, the color Black shifts from the concept of dark and absence to becoming an actual color. This event has been designed to be inclusive for a public with visual impairment, besides offering an immediate and highly stimulating sensorial experience to all visitors.

Bruno Corà, curator of this exhibition and President of Fondazione Burri, highlights how Black “between the Middle Ages and the XVII century was no longer considered a color. Artists restored its chromatic value and among them, in particular Kazimir Malevič, author of the well-known “Black Square on white background” (1915), a print of which is present in our exhibition”.
Among the artists of the second half of the XX century, Burri is the one who most used the color Black, to the extent of painting the Ex Seccatoi del Tabacco completely black. These industrial buildings became the museum hosting its major pictorial cycles.

Together with Burri, other artists included in this exhibition created artworks using black, such as Agnetti, Bassiri, Bendini, Castellani, Fontana, Hartung, Isgrò, Kounellis, Lo Savio, Morris, Nevelson, Nunzio, Parmiggiani, Schifano, Soulages and Tàpies. Each one of them with different modalities, intentions and meaning, all capable of arousing in the visitor different feelings, perceptions, sensations. Eventually, poets feelings as well are turned on Black and caecitas to explain the inner gaze of the psychic and poetic look in opposition to the actual vision.
The exhibition “La Luce del Nero” has been organized within the framework of the Creative Europe programme, through the “Beam Up” project (Blind Engagement In Accessible Museum Projects), which addresses the issue of accessibility of contemporary art for a public with visual impairment at an international and inclusive level.

This exhibition crowns the reopening of the venues of the Ex Seccatoi del Tabacco after 7 years of constructions, which fully upgraded these exhibition areas. As stated by Mr. Corà “in the world, there are very few artist’s museums such as the Burri museum in Città di Castello, which can pride itself on having a museum itinerary that starts from Palazzo Albizzini and ends to the Ex Seccatoi del Tabacco without fearing comparisons with any other museum”.

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ELOGE DE LA LUMIÈRE – IN PRAISE OF LIGHT Pierre Soulages – Tanabe Chikuunsai IV

Fondation Baur, Geneva

Tenmoku bowls with iridescent reflections, “mirror black” porcelains, and lacquer objects with shimmering surfaces, worked in depth: in capturing the light cast by the night, certain works reveal and exalt the colours of the shadows.

It is in the wake of this chiaroscuro heritage that the collections of the Baur Foundation, rich in rare pearls, chose to converse with some of the masterpieces by the painter of “lustrous blacks”, Pierre Soulages. The affinities that his art has cultivated with the “uncanny silence” and “colours of darkness” associated with Japanese aesthetics, celebrated by Junichiro Tanizaki (1886-1965), in his essay In Praise of Shadows, though purely contingent, are no less apparent. The Japanese themselves were not mistaken; very early on they understood the serious and timeless poetry of the Aveyron artist’s work. Following each step of his career since the presentation of one of his paintings at the first May Salon in Tokyo in 1951, they have been drawn to his art’s chromatic contrasts, stripped of all sentimentality and figuration, to its imposing and calm graphic phrasing, and to the materials conceived and fashioned as so many supports for light.

Some discern a resemblance to Far Eastern calligraphy in the lines of the “sign forms” heightened with walnut stain from the early days of the painter’s career; for others, the variegated thicknesses of the “beyond blacks” suggest the depth of makie-e lacquers, paintings sprinkled with light. The aim of this exhibition is to offer another encounter with the Land of the Rising Sun, this time originating in the erected lines, sound and light that pierce the forests of bamboo; the irregular “abstract sculpture” formed, in Pierre Soulages opinion, by the “writing of the branches in space”, is responded to by the stems and knots of the bamboo modelled in chiaroscuro by an exceptional artist who has today won international renown, Tanabe Chikuunsai IV.

The heir to ancestral traditions and techniques, and the fourth representative of a prestigious line of basket makers, Tanabe Chikuunsai IV works with the plant world with a new, sculptural, and luminous perspective. “Three years to split bamboo, eight years to weave it”: it takes three years to learn how to prepare bamboo and eight years to learn how to weave it into the desired shape, and for both hands to be completely imbued with the tradition. It is this repetition of the process by many artists that has kept the craft alive and resulted in the skills it requires being handed down for 150 years. Beyond formal evolutions, the basic techniques and tools have remained much the same. Tanabe uses machetes and small knives to chop bamboo, tools handed down from his great-grandfather. There is the use of water in weaving, of fire in the bending, and of the two hands to render the impossible possible.

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Calder, Soulages, Vasarely,… Abstractions plurielles (1950-1980)

Musée d'art de Pully

Le Musée d’art de Pully collabore avec la Fondation Gandur pour l’Art autour d’une exposition consacrée à la peinture informelle des années 1950 à 1980.

Les années qui suivent la Seconde Guerre mondiale connaissent une grande effervescence artistique. Paris reprend rapidement sa place de capitale culturelle et attire des peintres du monde entier. La tendance géométrique, qui prend sa source dans les avant-gardes du début du XXe siècle, connaît alors de nouveaux développements. De nombreux artistes mettent l’accent sur le geste ou la matière, recourent à de nouvelles techniques et repensent la peinture et ses supports.

Composée d’œuvres issues de la Fondation Gandur pour l’Art rarement présentées au public suisse, l’exposition propose un parcours original à travers la production bouillonnante des années 1950 à 1980, provenant des deux côtés de l’Atlantique.

Centrée sur les formes plurielles que prend l’abstraction au cours de cette période, elle montre les principales tendances : l’abstraction lyrique et gestuelle de Georges Mathieu ou de Hans Hartung, l’expressionnisme abstrait de Pierre Soulages ou de Sam Francis, l’abstraction géométrique de Victor Vasarely ou de François Morellet, ou encore la peinture minimale de Martin Barré, la sculpture cinétique de Jean Tinguely ou un monumental mobile d’Alexandre Calder. Quant au mouvemenent Supports/Surfaces, qui remet en question les moyens picturaux traditionnels, il marque à la fois une conclusion à cette période d’expérimentation intense et le début d’une aventure qui se poursuit aujourd’hui encore.

La Fondation Gandur pour l’Art a été créée en 2010 par Jean Claude Gandur, grand collectionneur d’art, afin de rendre accessible à un large public ses collections d’envergure internationale. Basée à Genève et reconnue d’utilité publique, la Fondation s’emploie à préserver, documenter, enrichir et exposer ses collections dans des institutions de renom en Suisse et à l’étranger.

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Soulages at the Louvre

Musée du Louvre, Paris

Pierre Soulages, “painter of black and light,” is a major figure of non-figurative painting, recognized as such since the start of his career after World War II. Born on December 24, 1919, in Rodez (south of France), Soulages, who continues to produce work at a steady pace, is celebrating his 100th birthday at the end of this year. To mark this event, the Musée du Louvre is devoting an exceptional exhibition to the artist in the prestigious Salon Carré, which is located between the Galerie d’Apollon and the Grande Galerie and used to house the Paris Salon.

This tribute exhibition traces the chronological development of Soulages’s work from 1946 to the present day, through a limited selection of pieces created over eight decades of artistic research. Soulages’s exceptionally long career is illustrated by some of his major works, most of them from prominent French and foreign museums. The exhibition covers every period, with a focus on the outrenoir polyptychs. It also presents a number of very large paintings executed in recent months, demonstrating the remarkable vitality of Soulages, who has never stopped working.

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