Pia Fries
FABELFAKT

Pia Fries’ paintings are characterized by her very direct use of color and paint, a great eagerness to experiment, and her quest for new, resistive articulations. The medium of paint is an essential element of her work and may take the form of a dense mass, a liquid trace, or an interplay of textures, compositional elements and reiterations of shapes. The exhibition’s title FABELFAKT alludes to an amalgamation of contrary notions. Using the technique of silkscreen printing, the artist applies fragments of historical prints onto the work’s support and responds to the representational interplay of contours with paint and painterly tools. As a result, her pictures oscillate between representation and abstraction, between history and present.

The exhibition in the Kunstpalast is the first major solo exhibition staged in Düsseldorf, comprising approximately 65 works, a selection draw from different bodies of work dating from the past twenty years, some of which have never been shown publicly before. The Swiss artist Pia Fries completed her painting studies as a master scholar of Gerhard Richter.