Pia Fries: tausend : einerlei

Collages between figuration and abstraction

Pia Fries (*1955) uses colour directly on her canvases, either as a dense mass or as a fluid trace, playing with textures, textures and repetitive forms. Like other of her contemporary painting colleagues, she makes virtuoso use of the possibilities of technical reproduction. However, with her use of photomechanical processes in her painterly work, she aims neither at aspects of transparency nor at those of recognising what is depicted, but rather focuses on the developing life of the various parts. The antithesis to her painting is graphic art, which oscillates in a fascinating way between representationalism and abstraction, between history and the present. For this series of works, she has therefore used three copies of the illustrated book "Chinesische Bambuspapierherstellung. A picture book from the 18th century", removed the text contributions and "released the individual colour plates into their independence", as she writes. "Then I appropriated these independent picture panels - redesigned them with colours and prints, and finally they turned into something new." Pia Fries, a master student of Gerhard Richter, studied in Düsseldorf from 1980 to 1986 and has gained international renown since her participation in the Venice Biennale curated by Harald Szeemann in 1999.