Pia Fries

CHRISTOPHER GRIMES GALELRY will present new paintings by Pia Fries from April 16 to May 21, 2005. A reception will be held on Saturday, April 16 from 6 to 8 PM. Thegallery is located at 916 Colorado Avenue in Santa Monica.

Pia Fries will exhibit new works on panel that exploit and enhance the physicality and brilliance of painting. Her impasto technique sculpts the paint, nearly exhausting all possible approaches to paint application and builds a relief that could read like a 3-D topographical map. She rolls, pours, drips, squeezes, presses, kneads, layers, and brushes the materials, oftentimes removing sections of paint to reveal multiple layers. The skeleton of the composition might consist of silk-screened images on a white background or, in the case of this new body of work, the actual wood panel. The relationship between the two result in compositions with complex passages and readings that, as art critic Peter Frank has noted, contradict the endgame pessimism of her former mentor, Gerhard Richter.

Born in Switzerland, Fries currently lives and works in Dusseldorf, Germany. Her work was included in Beau Monde, the 2001 SITE Santa Fe Biennial curated by Dave Hickey and in the 1999 Venice Biennale. This year she will be included in the exhibition Landscape Confection. The show will travel from the Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus to the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston and Orange County Museum of Art, Newport Beach. Other international exhibition venues include Kunstverein Freiburg, Germany; Kunstmuseum Lucerne, Lucerne, Switzerland; and the Gallery of Modern Art, Galsgow, Scotland, among others. This will be her second solo exhibition at the gallery.

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Pia Fries