Pierre Soulages has two loves… a Few months before the exhibition that will devote to the Louvre, the gallery Lévy Gorvy offers to the French painter first showcase in New York, the land of his adoption, for more than sixty years.

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The twenty paintings exhibited from Thursday and until the 26th of October in the building of the Upper East Side, Manhattan, scan 65 of the more than 80-year career of the master of Rodez. The oldest of which dates from 1954, the year during which the artist develops a relationship with the new york gallery Kootz, the starting point of its route, u.s., with the support of James Johnson Sweeney, curator at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA).

the genius of The black will be part of the first exhibition of the Guggenheim museum in the circular building iconic was designed by the architect Frank Lloyd Wright, in 1959. Most of the works presented by Levy Gorvy are from american collections or museums in the united states, witnesses to the interest awakened by Pierre Soulages in the United States, where he met Willem de Kooning or Mark Rothko.

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Levy Gorvy, one of the last galleries, which represents Pierre Soulages, continues to place paintings of the painter with american clients. Dominique Lévy, the co-founder of the gallery, with Brett Gorvy (former head of the contemporary art in the auction house Christie’s), is a large private merchant, New York. It is a party to the assault of the painter at lunch for the inauguration of his museum, in Rodez, in 2014.

Extension of the”Outrenoir”

“It is true that we would have been able to sell ten times to Europeans, but we said no, we will first see where they can be placed in the United States,” says Dominique Lévy. On the occasion of the exhibition in new york, the painter, now established in Sète and always prolific 99-year-old has specifically made two paintings, completed in the spring of last year.

They are an extension of the”Outrenoir”, this universe that was imagined by Pierre Soulages in 1979, when it took the dramatic turn-around in the complete dark. The painter continues his work with the light, which invites the visitor to gravitate physically around the work, in order to grasp the nuances.

“It’s amazing to me because I don’t know an artist that reinvents itself (like that) again and again. I do not feel never a repetition in the work of Soulages,” says AFP Dominique Lévy. None of the paintings shown in New York will be the exhibition of the Louvre, is expected in December.

“It is two exhibitions that dance together,” says the gallery owner, noting that the exhibition at the Louvre will present almost the same number of works (21) own (20). “It was the idea of one not of two,” she continued, “and the hope of giving a flick to the american museums and their saying: it is time to do a real retrospective of Soulages.”