PIERRE SOULAGES: Paintings on Paper
Lévy Gorvy Dayan is pleased to announce Pierre Soulages: Paintings on Paper, in New York.
September 17 - October 24, 2026
Paintings on Paper marks the sixth solo exhibition of Soulages’s work presented by Dominique Lévy during her decades-long relationship with the artist and his estate. The medium of paper is foundational to Soulages’s artistic practice, dating back to the mid-1940s. Paper was his first support, and he evolved his body of paintings on paper alongside and independently to his canvases; the paper works often anticipating developments he would bring to his oil compositions. Arguably, the artist’s works on paper are the purest form of his painterly expression.
Importantly, as Pierre Encrevé, the author of Soulages’s catalogue raisonné, notes, the artist’s paintings on paper are autonomous and do not constitute studies for the canvases. He states, “Paper never functions as the place for making sketches that the canvas might then lead to completion; rather, it is a specific creative territory where freedom to experiment authorizes what sometimes appears, after the event, as genuine prefigurations of what the painter did on canvas only later.” He continues, “For Soulages, there has never been a hierarchy between works on canvas and works on paper.”
The earliest innovations that would determine the rest of Soulages’s storied career catalyzed on paper in 1947. Breaking with the figurative and colorful neo-Fauvist paintings of the School of Paris that were widely exhibited at the time, Soulages turned to walnut stain (brou de noix) on paper to create striking abstract compositions. He reflected, “It was with the walnut stain paintings that I was able to get myself together and obey a kind of inner imperative. The truth is that I felt restricted by oils. I’d used them before the war and I knew what the constraints were. One day, in a burst of impatience and temper, I grabbed some walnut stain and some housepainter’s brushes and unleashed myself on paper.”
Soulages sought similar flexible densities in his subsequent paintings on paper utilizing ink and gouache. These pigments allowed him to work with luminosity in different ways than in oil and acrylic on canvas. Across his paintings on paper, the white of the paper constitutes a compositional form. In these works, he seeks, as he described, an “[emerging] relationship with the ground: a painterly light sparked by contrast or the picture’s reflection of light.” Expanding his use of unconventional materials, Soulages took up scrapers, blades, sponges, and other tools of his own invention. He explained, “Not wanting to be tricked by the tools that were on offer and that didn’t suit me, because they were made for a kind of painting with a practice and an ideology that didn’t suit me, I made my own tools.” Soulages advanced his artistic experimentations with light on paper until 2004, creating a body of work featuring active and involved surfaces marked by an interplay of bold, saturated strokes and those seemingly illuminated in their transparency.