from Artsy: "At 95 years old, Pierre Soulages is France’s most famous, most popular and most successful living painter. Born in 1919, the abstract painter was known throughout the 1950s and 1960s as a French parallel to the American Abstract Expressionism of artists like Mark Rothko and Willem de Kooning, with whom he worked intimately during his time in New York. His childhood fascination with prehistoric art is evident in his dark paintings, dubbed “outrenoir”, or beyond black. Known today as the “painter of black”, Soulages has obsessively worked with this non-colour since the beginning of his career, gaining him international recognition as one of the first painters to develop new style of post-war abstraction. Even in his later works the prolific artist continues to investigate the depth and light so deeply connected to his signature paintings."