Pierre Soulages died in October 2022, at 102. Up until his death, he was known as “the painter of black.” As he once said of a solar eclipse, “The masked sun was the black of before the light, before colors, that which I love for its gravity, its radicalness. It was like the origin of the world, our origins too, before being born.” Soulages started playing with black after W.W. II, while studying at the Fine Arts School of Montpelier. In 1947, he opened a studio in Paris, where he dedicated himself to “complete abstraction.” The exhibition at Lévy Gorvy Dayan traverses seven decades of his practice, from his early years up until 2022. It is dedicated to his wife, Colette Soulages, just ahead of the one-year anniversary of his death. —Elena Clavarino