Pierre Soulages is aFrench artist whose thick black brushstrokes—labeled outrenoir (beyond black)—against lighter backgrounds have characterised his painting since the late 1940s. Part of the movement towards abstraction with Jean Fautrier and Hans Hartung in Paris, his gestural paintings echoed the Abstract Expressionist movement emerging simultaneously in the United States. His strong application of pigment in non-representational forms is said to have been influenced by the pre historicand Romanesque art near his childhood home. Soulages became the first contemporary artist to be shown at St. Petersburg’s Hermitage Museum in 2001.

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