Pia Fries: Tausend: Einerlei

Collages between representation and abstraction

Pia Fries (*1955) applies paint directly to her canvases, either as a compact mass or liquid trace and in the process plays with textures, factures, and repetitive forms. She makes masterful use of the possibilities of technical reproduction, as other contemporary painters have done as well. Her use of photomechanical processes in her painterly work, however, is not aimed at aspects of transparency or recognition of what is depicted, but rather focuses on the developing autonomy of the various parts. Her graphic art is the polar opposite to her painting; it alternates in a fascinating way between figuration and abstraction, between history and the present. For the present series of works, she has taken apart three copies of the illustrated book »Chinesische Bambuspapierherstellung. Ein Bilderbuch aus dem 18. Jahrhundert«, a picture book on Chinese bamboo paper production from the eighteenth century, removed the text contributions »and released the individual color plates into their individual autonomy. I then appropriated these independent picture panels - reshaped them using paints and prints, and finally they transformed into something new.« Pia Fries, a master student of Gerhard Richter, studied in Düsseldorf from 1980 to 1986 and has gained widespread international recognition after participating in Harald Szeemann's Venice Biennale in 1999.