Pia Fries

The new series by Pia Fries is located in between painting and printmaking. Three impasto brush applications of white oil paint on a piece of jute are the starting point of this series. The photographic image of these painterly gestures is transferred to the surface in several steps by means of screen- printing. Because the artist does the printing herself by hand, each sheet is unique. Fries combines a classic trompe-l'œil with a moiré effect, thereby creating a spatial illusion through screen-printing. Fries achieves this by covering the silkscreen and parts of the sheet in multiple stages, so that only one segment of the surface is ever released for the gradually added painterly gestures. The combinatorial process of printmaking and painting is complex and elaborate but allows the emancipation of the silkscreen as an independent painterly element. The composition unites in a poetic way the print and the painting to a manifold play of layers, colors, lines, and grids.

The importance of printmaking elements also runs through a much of Pia Fries' oeuvre. Since the early 2000s, the artist has reflected on the printed and reproduced image as a form-giving element in her painting. In doing so, she takes classical print fragments, for example by Maria Sibylla Merian or Hendrick Goltzius, and develops a new painterly language based on motif excerpts. She uses those motifs less as a reference than as an independent pictorial element, emphasizing the autonomy of the printed as well as the painted image. The series of works "genau dies / just hier / wird das”, 2021 is typical of her working method in several respects. On the one hand, gestural abstraction in the work of Pia Fries oscillates between material and color language. Here, the dynamic component is created by the encounter of the subjective gesture with the printed elements. On the other hand, word creations as titles have played a role in the work of Pia Fries for a long time. These are language games that demonstrate the experimental nature of the artist's intermedial and processual work. The juxtaposition of words seemingly taken out of context highlights, after prolonged reflection, the clarity of the existential, painterly moment.

Pia Fries last institutional solo exhibitions were at Kunstpalast Düsseldorf (2019), Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris (2019) and Museum Kurhaus Kleve (2017). She was awarded the prestigious Gerhard Altenbourg Prize in 2017. Her work was shown at the Venice Biennale curated by Harald Szeemann in 1999. Pia Fries' works are in the collections of LACMA, Los Angeles, and Museum Folkwang, Essen, among others.