PIA FRIES

"A decisive transformation within Pia Fries’ oeuvre started around 2016. The focus of the screen prints increasingly shifted from the substance of paint to the pictorial carrier itself. The wood serves less as a motif; instead, it thematizes the structural condition of the painting itself. The photographed wooden surfaces introduce a specific temporality into the picture: Grooves, incisions, growth rings, and traces of abrasion function as indexes of past processes. In this sense, the material itself becomes the carrier of a history—with the story being told not as a narrative but as a visibly rendered trace.

 

This indexical characteristic points once again to the photographic element that works as a system of traces in Pia Fries’ oeuvre. But in contrast to classic photography, which is often thought to be a direct depiction of reality, these traces are transferred into a painterly context, where they are transformed. The result is a hybrid image that cannot be unambiguously attributed to a single medium and, precisely through this indefiniteness, its aesthetic power unfolds."

- Angela Stief in "Pia Fries: pontes & arbores"

"The deliberate reduction of the range of colors—especially the concentration on black, white, gray, and brown with which she was already experimenting in 2008—fortifies this focus on materiality and structure. Color is not employed primarily as a chromatic value but as a physical substance that asserts itself in space. The color white does not in any way function as a neutral background. The artist repeatedly renders the ground (i.e., the wood) recognizable through processes of omission, which point to white as an active component of the composition. White does not serve as an empty surface (in a certain sense as a nullification of the painting), but rather as a space of possibility that imparts structure to the other pictorial elements and sets them in mutual relation."

- Angela Stief in "Pia Fries: pontes & arbores"

"Pia Fries has built an aesthetic practice characterized by extreme theoretical reflectivity and a pronounced sensual presence. It operates at the interfaces between material, medium, and motif, deriving from them a visual language that defies any sort of unambiguous categorization. Her continuous negotiation of control and coincidence, of constructedness and openness brings to light an artistic attitude that understands painting to be a dynamic, never finalized process. It is a field in which thinking and seeing, material and idea, theory and practice are inseparably intertwined."

- Angela Stief in "Pia Fries: pontes & arbores"