Black and white pieces are the hallmark of Pierre Soulages (born 1919), who was considered a European counterweight to American abstract expressionists like Franz Kline and Jackson Pollock. Today, the artist looks back on 60 years of creating art that is being presented through 80 representative works from the period from 1946 to today. Momentum and constant renewal appear as characteristics of an oeuvre that grows still today. Important initial works on paper and glass shape the years from 1947-1949 and are replaced by the famous oil paintings from the period 1950-1970. Soulages placed broad, black calligraphic bar shapes on a light background and is represented in the I (1955), II (1959) and III (1964) in Kassel. Starting in 1979, Soulage was dedicated to the distribution of light through reflections on a surface fully covered in black. His paintings are now monochrome black and form with the focus on only one color a counter-model to monochrome in modern art. The exhibition as well as this catalog show the diversity within this reduction and elaborate on the previously known range of the artist with an emphasis on recent, largely unpublished works. German text.