Soulages © Centre Pompidou

The Centre Pompidou is putting on a large scale retrospective to celebrate the work of the greatest painter on the current French scene, Pierre Soulages. As he nears his 90th birthday, Soulages, the "painter of black and light", is recognised as one of abstract art's major figures.

The Centre Pompidou held its first large scale exhibition of Pierre Soulages in 1979, following on from the show given at the National Museum of Modern Art in 1967, before the Centre was opened. This autumn's show looks back over more than 60 years of painting and offers a new reading of the artist's oeuvre, with the emphasis on the more recent developments in his work.

The exhibition brings together over a hundred major works dating from 1946 to the present day, from the striking walnut stain works painted between 1947 and 1949 to the paintings of recent years, most of them shown for the first time, which display the dynamism and diversity of his constantly evolving approach.