Pierre Soulages: Paintings on Paper
17 September - 24 October 2026
Lévy Gorvy Dayan
19 East 64 Street

Scroll to the bottom of this webpage to preview works on view.

Organized with the artist's widow—and featuring rare and never-exhibited works directly from the artist's estate—Lévy Gorvy Dayan will present a new exhibition of more than twenty paintings on paper by French master Pierre Soulages (1919 - 2022).

A continuation of Dominique Lévy's decades-long relationship with the artist prior to his death, the exhibition celebrates his life and legacy. The location of Lévy Gorvy Dayan's historic townhouse on the Upper East Side is a fortuitous nod to the neigborhood history of Soulages' earliest exhibitions in New York (with Betty Parsons, Leo Castelli, Sidney Janis, and Samuel Kootz) and the vibrant 1950s-60s New York art zeitgeist that nurtured him alongside so many now-canonical artists associated with Abstract Expressionism.

Painting on paper was a foundational medium in Soulages' practice, dating to the 1940s. As paper is so absorptive and unforgiving, the medium appealed to him because it required rapid decision-making and denied opportunities for changes or corrections; it allowed him to capture what he described as his "inner imperative." Soulages reflected in later life: “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.” Using materials such as gouache and ink in addition to his signature walnut stain, he often improvised his own tools (such as scrapers and blades) to achieve desired effects of transparency, opacity, and light. 

Rather than studies for paintings on canvas, Soulages' paintings on paper are conceptually autonomous, and in fact represent what some historians consider to be the purest form of his painterly expression. As Pierre Encrevé, the author of Soulages’s catalogue raisonné, notes: “For Soulages, there has never been a hierarchy between works on canvas and works on paper.” The key distinction in process is that Soulages did not need to plan his paintings on paper in advance and wait for a stretcher to be prepared; there was an innate freedom to intuitively and spontaneously experiment. 

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More information is in the above-linked press release, and a preview of works on view is below. See the Dropbox folder linked above to download web-resolution image files. Artwork information is in each image’s file title. Image reuse must be exclusively in association with press coverage of the exhibition.