We have pleasure in presenting new paintings by the Swiss artist Pia Fries (born in Beromünster in 1955, lives and works in Düsseldorf) at our next exhibition. Her work has recently been exhibited in the Kunstmuseum in Lucerne, the Bernard Jacobson Gallery in London and the Josef Albers Museum Quadrat in Bottrop. In May/June 2007, the Kunstmuseum Winterthur dedicated a comprehensive overview exhibition to work by this ex-pupil of Gerhard Richter. Her work is also included in important private and public collections in Switzerland and abroad, for example the Kunsthaus Zurich, the Staatsgalerie Stuttgart, the Folkwang Museum Essen and the Neues Mu- seum, Nuremberg.
About painting by Pia Fries – gutzgauch élévateur:
A painting does not begin with an untouched canvas, on a white plane. The picture surface is always so covered with existing ideas that it must first of all be wiped clean, washed down, even torn to strips.
It is better to forget than to remember when starting a painting.
Thus the image carrier shows its multiple natures,
oscillates between surface and background: incessant change.
The ground of the painting is crucial: as motivation, motive and motion.
A painting is not a book one reads in order to shine.
Colour is not a container for mental constructs, trains of thought or points of view. Colour does not clothe alien forms, it creates them.
Colour does not obey alien orders, it has its own intentions.
Colour shows its body in different consistencies. Colour is: desire.
Gutz-gauch, the curious chameleon figure,
high flyer and deliverer of turbulences, differences.
Its tone, its alluring sound, calls and guides the searching, wandering gaze while it whirls, prepared for flight, vivacity – and fall. [Pia Fries]