Mai 36 is delighted to present corpus transludi, a solo exhibition by Swiss artist Pia Fries featuring new works.
The current group of works heightens the tension between the «here and now» of the painterly act and the «then and there» of art history. The new works do not spring from nowhere. They are a reiteration in the literal sense of repeating by bringing something back again – in this case, extractions from existing images in circulation of existing images, trans-formed and re-formed.
At the heart of the exhibition is the new group of works corpus transludi, based on the Four Disgracers series of engravings by Hendrick Goltzius (1558 – 1617).
The bodies and body parts hover into view and out again, entering the picture and leaving it. Fries pits her fragmentary approach to painting against the fragmentation of the body. Her painterly gestures around, towards and within the falling figures actually conceal, dissect, hide and delete them. Yet, remarkably, they also take on a blind and faceless corporeality that transforms the body from an image into a painting of abstract sensuality and vibrant materiality.