Pia Fries
14 Sep - 20 Oct 2006
PIA FRIES
"Plumbago"
Pia Fries (Switzerland 1955) shows her latest work again at Distrito Cu4tro two and a half years after her ORNITHOLOGY in 2004. During these two years the artist has had solo shows in Europe: Bernard Jacobson Gallery, London (2006), Art unlimited, ART BASEL (2005), Galerie Nelson, Paris (2005), Galeria Filomena Soares, Lisboa (2005), and in the USA: GRG Gallery New York (2004), Christopher Grimes Gallery, Santa Monica L.A. (2005), Aurobora Press, San Francisco, C.A. She has also taken part in group shows in both continents, such as Kunstmuseum Winterthur, Switzerland (2005), Extreme Abstraction, curated by Claire Scheneider in Albrighty-Knox Art Gallery, Nueva York (2005). Her program for the near future includes an exhibition at Kunstmuseum Winterthur, Switzerland in 2007.
The force which drives the creative work of this Dьsseldorf painter draws on conditions and possibilities which bring depth into non-figurative painting. Time and again Fries is questioning how best to move forward. So from the beginning, the “developing” character of her painterly activity has been located in the same place as her artistic thinking, a character, though, which in her paintings is reflected less as marks than as an imprint of an action which is always clear to the person looking at her work.
For some years Pia Fries has been working with silkscreen printing as a means of reproduction, as a way of dealing with how to reproduce an image technically and what this does to the paint. At the beginning she was working out by this means what was fundamental to her painting, so that she transferred her artistic material, in the form of individual coloured elements captured photographically, and she reacted against the resulting silkscreen prints – which even though they were abstract yet displayed a marked illusory effect due to the photomechanical reproduction – by using concrete pictorial interventions.
In the new exhibition of the artist’s work, the “non-colours” black and white take on a dominant role. They become harsh, nearly always put against warm colours. Splitting, contrasting and inverting form important underlying motifs. With the black and white geometric surfaces which appear in the new work, she restates the question about pictorial space in relation to the painting as concrete object and as body. The many inversions of figure and background, the overlappings, turns and visual effects in precarious balance all give the motifs a dynamics which precludes single interpretation.
So because there is more than one way to read these paintings, we come back to them again and again. And for that reason the viewer is always aware of the ambiguity, the inconclusive character of his/her own perception.
© Pia Fries
Pomp, 2006
Oil and serigraphy on wood
70 x 100 cm.
"Plumbago"
Pia Fries (Switzerland 1955) shows her latest work again at Distrito Cu4tro two and a half years after her ORNITHOLOGY in 2004. During these two years the artist has had solo shows in Europe: Bernard Jacobson Gallery, London (2006), Art unlimited, ART BASEL (2005), Galerie Nelson, Paris (2005), Galeria Filomena Soares, Lisboa (2005), and in the USA: GRG Gallery New York (2004), Christopher Grimes Gallery, Santa Monica L.A. (2005), Aurobora Press, San Francisco, C.A. She has also taken part in group shows in both continents, such as Kunstmuseum Winterthur, Switzerland (2005), Extreme Abstraction, curated by Claire Scheneider in Albrighty-Knox Art Gallery, Nueva York (2005). Her program for the near future includes an exhibition at Kunstmuseum Winterthur, Switzerland in 2007.
The force which drives the creative work of this Dьsseldorf painter draws on conditions and possibilities which bring depth into non-figurative painting. Time and again Fries is questioning how best to move forward. So from the beginning, the “developing” character of her painterly activity has been located in the same place as her artistic thinking, a character, though, which in her paintings is reflected less as marks than as an imprint of an action which is always clear to the person looking at her work.
For some years Pia Fries has been working with silkscreen printing as a means of reproduction, as a way of dealing with how to reproduce an image technically and what this does to the paint. At the beginning she was working out by this means what was fundamental to her painting, so that she transferred her artistic material, in the form of individual coloured elements captured photographically, and she reacted against the resulting silkscreen prints – which even though they were abstract yet displayed a marked illusory effect due to the photomechanical reproduction – by using concrete pictorial interventions.
In the new exhibition of the artist’s work, the “non-colours” black and white take on a dominant role. They become harsh, nearly always put against warm colours. Splitting, contrasting and inverting form important underlying motifs. With the black and white geometric surfaces which appear in the new work, she restates the question about pictorial space in relation to the painting as concrete object and as body. The many inversions of figure and background, the overlappings, turns and visual effects in precarious balance all give the motifs a dynamics which precludes single interpretation.
So because there is more than one way to read these paintings, we come back to them again and again. And for that reason the viewer is always aware of the ambiguity, the inconclusive character of his/her own perception.
© Pia Fries
Pomp, 2006
Oil and serigraphy on wood
70 x 100 cm.