Tony Soulie Art

Unique late 20th century original acrylic and oil on canvas abstract, 'les trois oursins', 'the three sea urchins' by French artist Tony Soulié, signed and dated 1997 to the reverse. Presented in modern black 'tray' frame. This is the original and unique work on canvas which inspired Soulié to later create his various limited edition lithographs of a similar image. The painting has a wonderful and impactful contrast of colours and great use of material in an impasto technique. Tony Soulié (born 1955) is a French artist working in painting, printmaking, sculpture, installation art and photography. Soulié was part of the “Nouvelle Abstraction” (Neo Post Pictorialism) French movement in the 1970-1980s. His art has been widely exhibited throughout the world and his works are featured in many public and private collections including the Museum of Modern Art, Paris, Utsunomiya Museum of Art and Hawaii State Foundation on Culture and the Arts. Soulié was born and raised in Paris, France. He earned his degrees at the École des Arts Appliqués. Although he is generally referred to as a painter, he has also created numerous artist's books, sculptures and prints as well as installations and performances. Soulié did on-stage performances in a series of theatrical productions between 1982 and 1991. He later designed scenography for a number of productions. He did many installations of land art, especially on volcanoes – even in some cases inside the craters of active volcanoes. Although coming from a family with its roots in the region of Albi in southern France, Soulié grew up in Paris in the Bastille/ Marais neighbourhood, then dominated by the furniture handcraft industry. His first personal gallery show opened at the Gallery Durgnat, Switzerland in 1977 and he was featured in the 1984 show at the Grand Palais: "peintures, l’autre nouvelle generation" that was the showcase that launched a new generation of French Artists. The Grand Palais show was immediately followed by a growing series of regular exhibitions. He became a featured artist at the Françoise Palluel Gallery that showed his works, starting with the 1985 Foire internationale d'art contemporain (FIAC) Art Fair and in 1996 the Soulié exhibition launched the Dhalgren Gallery. He was awarded the grant “Villa-Medicis hors les murs” by the French Academy in Rome in 1987. This allowed him to establish himself in Naples where he started working on installations doing land-art on the volcanoes starting with the neighbouring Vesuvius. 1990 saw him designing the spinnaker carried by one of the contestants in the Whitbread Round the World Race (now the Volvo Ocean Race) which narrowly escaped sinking as a result of being bumped by a whale in the Tasman Sea. In 1992 he was one of the artists representing France at the Universal Exposition of Seville Expo '92 in Spain. He continued meanwhile the land-art installations on volcanoes in 1997 with Big Island and Mauï in the Hawaïi archipelago. The work was part of a photographic exhibition the same year in The Contemporary Museum, Honolulu. He also started working with the Galerie Protée that has remained one of his main representations in Paris. In 1996 he started travelling the African coasts and he brought back photo paintings from Zanzibar, Benin and other countries. The themes developed in his works in Africa were subject to a parallel work done on the Murano Island of Venice, Italy, the glass-pearl produce of which played such a key role in the slave-trade off the African coast. During 1998 and 1999 he worked with Simone Cenedese, maestro vetraio of Murano in realizing a series of glass-sculptures based on African fetish...