Pia Fries @ Miles McEnery Gallery, NYC - "heliopedi" Exhibition

Pia Fries: heliopedi

Miles McEnery Gallery, New York 

7 September - 21 October 2023 

PIA FRIES

floredot C, 2023 

Oil and silkscreen on wood 

67 x 86 5/8 inches, 170.2 x 220 cm

© Pia Fries, courtesy Miles McEnery Gallery

Miles McEnery Gallery presents heliopedi, an exhibition of paintings by PIA FRIES, on view at 515 West 22nd Street in New York City. 

In this cycle of paintings—which spans 18 years—Pia Fries holds freedom and limits in taut balance. Vigorous gestural abstraction and razor-sharp precision of line are intertwined. Fragmented and enlarged, 17th century etchings—fractions of the male form by Dutch engraver Hendrick Goltzius, and flora and fauna by German entomologist and botanical illustrator, Maria Sibylla Merian—appear repeatedly in the compositions on view, peeking out from Fries’ own bold and decisive sweeps of oil paint. 

“We discover a new wildness of material, image and meaning in Fries’ paintings,” writes Christopher Bedford in the catalogue essay, “Fries is interested in describing something new—a new type of painting more grounded in discovery than in either abstract or representational. Her paintings are both, and she refuses to choose.”

PIA FRIES (b. 1955, Beromünster, Switzerland) attended the Lucerne University of Applied Sciences and Arts, Switzerland, before studying under Gerhard Richter at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf, Germany. From 2014 to 2023, Pia Fries held a professorship at Munich’s Academy of Fine Arts.

Over the course of her nearly four-decade career, Pia Fries has exhibited internationally at numerous institutions and galleries. In 1999, her work was included in the 48th Venice Biennale exhibition, dAPERTutto, curated by Harald Szeemann. Notable solo exhibitions of her work have been held at Kunsthaus Baselland, Switzerland; Kunstpalast Düsseldorf, Germany; Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, France; Staatliche Kunsthalle Karlsruhe, Germany; Josef Albers Museum Quadrat Bottrop, Germany; Kunstmuseum Luzern, Switzerland, and elsewhere. 

Pia Fries’ work is held in the collections of the Buffalo AKG Art Museum, Buffalo, NY; Detroit Institute of Arts, MI; Kunstmuseum Bonn, Germany; Kunsthaus Zürich, Switzerland; Kunstpalast Düsseldorf, Germany; Los Angeles County Museum of Art, CA; Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, France; Neues Museum Nürnberg, Germany; Sprengel Museum, Hanover, Germany; and the Staatsgalerie Stuttgart, Germany, among others.

Pia Fries lives and works in Düsseldorf, Germany and Lucerne, Switzerland.

The exhibition is accompanied by a fully illustrated publication featuring an essay by Christopher Bedford. 

MILES McENERY GALLERY

515 West 22nd Street, New York, NY 10011

www.milesmcenery.com

Ian Anüll - Pia Fries - Christian Lindow - Harald F. Müller - Christoph Rütimann - Albrecht Schnider - Rémy Zaugg @ Mai 36 Galerie, Zürich

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Ian Anüll - Pia Fries - Christian Lindow - Harald F. Müller - Christoph Rütimann - Albrecht Schnider - Rémy Zaugg

Mai 36 Galerie, Zürich

January 29 – March 27, 2021

Mai 36 Galerie presents the exhibition «.ch» bringing together works by Ian Anüll, Pia Fries, Christian Lindow, Harald F. Müller, Christoph Rütimann, Albrecht Schnider and Rémy Zaugg in seven of the gallery’s rooms. What all of these artists have in common is a personal link with Zurich and Switzerland.

Ian Anüll (born 1948; lives and works in Zurich) uses various techniques and media such as photography, sculptural objects and sculptural installations. The diverse materials he deploys are often found objects from the worlds of consumerism, mass media, signs and nature. Anüll reinvents and recalibrates familiar signs and symbols in ingenious ways, subtly alienating and transforming them, with shifts in context that reveal surprising new forms of interpretation.

Pia Fries, born in Beromünster LU in 1955, has been living and working in Düsseldorf for many years. A leading light of European abstract painting, her bold painterly approach shows colors, forms and structures as individually organized constructs, abandoning traditional systems of order and values. The paint converges and merges, forming pathways, traces and fluid movements that lend form to the whole. In recent years, Pia Fries has also adopted structures from found images, screen-printing them onto the carrier and using this as the starting point for her painting.

Christian Lindow was born in Thüringen/Germany in 1945 and settled in Bern in the late 1960s. After working on geometric sculptures and conceptual photography, he later began painting in an illustrative style. Soon, he began applying the paint more thickly, with broader, brisker and more gestural strokes, lending his paintings, which consist mostly of a single motif, an overall architectural feel. Christian Lindow died in Bern in 1990. His estate is represented by Mai 36 Galerie.

Harald F. Müller (born 1950 in Karlsruhe) lives and works by Lake Constance. His oeuvre includes photography, painting and sculpture, often in combination with architecture. Photographic materials, gathered through extensive research in archives and libraries, form an integral part of his colorful, sculpturally-inclined and mostly multi-part wall pieces. In addition, Müller often works with architects to create color concepts for buildings as well as creating color-oriented sculptures for public spaces.

The oeuvre of Christoph Rütimann (born in Zurich in 1955, lives and works in Mühlheim TG) ranges from performance art to word and sound installations, from photo and video work to drawing, painting and sculpture. He constantly questions the fundamental parameters of these diverse artistic media. For all their disparity, certain shared constants can be discerned between these artistic forms of expression in his oeuvre: line and color, the role of chance, and scientific phenomena such as gravitation.

The visual work of Albrecht Schnider (born 1958 in Lucerne, lives and works in Hilterfingen BE) emerges between the two poles of drawing and painting, starting with a spontaneous sketch and developing into a painting of almost iconic radiance. The drawings are created with maximum freedom and independence, unburdened by any primary aim to compose or design, but instead allowing the line to flow directly from the hand, as in a kind of écriture automatique.

The image itself lies at the heart of the artistic output of Rémy Zaugg (born 1943 in Courgenay JU) and forms the basis for exploring the meaning of perception, its conditions and limitations. For Zaugg, the artwork could not exist without perception. He used this as a stylistic means of addressing and discussing fundamental issues in his images, texts and projects. He died in Basel in 2005.

Mai 36 Galerie//Victor Gisler 

MAI 36 GALERIE

Raemistrasse 37, 8001 Zürich

mai36.com

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