Pia Fries

Work

Dana Friis-Hansen summarizes Pia Fries' work in a comprehensive review: "Pia Fries is one of an emerging generation of painters whose work results from a conceptual and aesthetic wrestling match modernist painting, the dominant artistic expression of the twentieth century. Perhaps it is too easy to project Oedipal overtones to this phenomenon, but in the late 1990s, the question "Is Painting Dead?" rose (once again) from the grave where it had been buried since the 1970s. Displaced as the avant- destination of choice by more pluralistic pursuits including sculpture, installation, performance, and transmedia, painting lost its primacy. Ironically, a generation later, the most advanced and dedicated artists are drawn to the activity again, yet rather than unabashed celebration, they seem compelled to resurrect painting by killing it.

Fries unleashes a cacophony of color and texture onto each hard white field (wood panel primed with six or seven layers) to create her sophisticated, energetic paintings. A rigid surface is required for the processes she enacts; she was trained as a sculptor before shifting to this fluid, flatter medium, so her tools are important, and range from traditional choices such as palette knives, spatulas, and brushes to objects foreign to the studio including syringes, industrial objects, application objects she makes herself. This gives her myriad methods to manipulate the pure oil paint that is sometimes thickened with resin, sometimes thinned with medium, sometimes flatly silk-screened onto the face.

Addition and subtraction is part of a painter's customary process, and in her Duesseldorf studio Fries has several paintings in progress at once. The works evolve organically. "I take my time," she explains, "I like to step back, reflect, distance myself for the next step and then work again ... learning as I go on." The eye gains much from slow scrutiny of her episodic painterly skirmishes.

The viewer can easily follow the artist's journey, as these paintings are clearly built from separate painterly "events" spread out across the clean bright void. She subtlety acknowledges–and sometimes even emphasizes–the boundaries of the rigid quadrilateral through framelike, angular elements. But these are usually pushed to the side, offering counterpoint to the graceful swooshes, ethereal spills, muscular swipes, and awkward smears that dominate and draw our eye around the work. By distributing these varied incidents around and about the snow-white surface, she creates a visual music that connects less with the symphonic harmonies of Kandinsky than with the eclecticism of contemporary sampling and music concrete. The connection to post-modern pastiche draws from the wide index of "styles" of paint application found within one work, from thinned washes that suggest watercolor and flat, thick, hard-edged stripes to upside-down drips and plenty of messy squishes of thick pigment. Her use of color is daring and inventive, swinging widely between "recognizable" standards such as baby boy blue and sun yellow and unexpected mixes of orange, white, and purple churned together then smeared into yellow wiped through with pale green. It is with panache and intelligent control that she juggles so much at once, pushing and pulling us between mark and void, light and heavy, fast and slow, horizontal and vertical, straight and curved. Pia Fries pulls it off."

Selected Collections

Selected exhibitions