Exhibition period: 30.06. - 03.09.2006
Opening: 29.06. 19.00, large hall
Curator: Andrea Rygg Karberg
Exhibition organisation: Sonja Traar

For sixty years Pierre Soulages has been considered one of France’s most important painters, and on 28 June 2006 he will receive the Austrian Order of Honour for Science and Art from the Austrian federal president Heinz Fischer. For the first time, the Danish curator Andrea Rygg Karberg will be exhibiting 13 works of the artist in the possession of The Essl Collection. At the same time, it is the largest collection of his work outside France. The works cover all his creative periods and trace the artist’s changes of style. The exhibition will be supplemented by key works from Soulages’s own collection, as well as loans from various museums.

Pierre Soulages, born in 1919, is often classified as a gestural painter of the 1950s. Since 1979, his new style of painting – outrenoir painting – has strengthened the interactivity between the art object, painter, observer, light, space and time, which also shows him as a painter of the present day.

With black, Soulages manages to paint light in different ways. He employs black in order to emphasise the light effect of white or other colours on the canvas, or he allows black to cover other colours, which shimmer out from underneath in some places.

In his more recent outrenoir works, Soulages no longer paints the light; rather he employs real light as part of the materials used. The relief-like structures of these works create light reflections which change according to the way the light strikes them and the position of the observer. The colour blue also has a special affinity for Soulages. He mixes blue and black in varied ways and thus manages to get gigantic blue surfaces to vibrate on a light ground.

PIERRE SOULAGES Peinture 81 x 65 cm, 1949 (1949) oil on canvas 81 x 65 cm © VBK, Wien, 2006	PIERRE SOULAGES Peinture 162 x 130 cm, 26 mai 1963 (1963) oil on canvas 162 x 130 cm © VBK, Wien, 2006

At the special request of the artist, some of the large-format works have been hung on steel wires from the ceiling. Thus visitors have the opportunity to walk around the art works and experience them as objects.

PIERRE SOULAGES Peinture 223 x 223 cm, 20 mai 2000 (2000) oil on canvas 223 x 223 cm © VBK, Wien, 2006

The Danish art historian Andrea Rygg Karberg is curating the exhibition. She has concerned herself intensively with the work of Pierre Soulages for years.

PIERRE SOULAGES Peinture 97 x 130 cm, 14 novembre 1963 (1963) oil on canvas 97 x 130 cm © VBK, Wien

Catalogue

PIERRES SOULAGES – PAINTING THE LIGHT German and English. 88 pages with numerous color images. With articles by Prof. Karlheinz Essl und Andrea Rygg Karberg, also containing an extensively biography and bibliography of the artist. Edition Sammlung Essl Privatstiftung: Klosterneuburg 2006 € 15,00 (Order by E-Mail) ISBN-10: 3-902001-31-3, ISBN-13: 978-3-902001-31-3

Partners of The Essl Collection: