Pia Friestausend : einerlei

Pia Fries (b. 1955) applies paint directly to her canvases, either as a dense mass or as a fluid trace, playing with textures, facture and repeating forms. Like other of her contemporary colleagues in painting, she makes virtuoso use of the possibilities of technical reproduction. With her use of photomechanical processes in painterly work, however, she aims neither at aspects of transparency nor at the recognisability of what is depicted, but is focused on the developing life of its own that each of the various parts takes on. The counterpole to her painting is printmaking, which shifts in fascinating ways between representation and abstraction, between history and the present. For the present series of works she therefore took apart three copies of the illustrated volume “Chinesische Bambuspapierherstellung. Ein Bilderbuch aus dem 18. Jahrhundert,” removed the texts and “released the individual colour plates into their independence,” as she writes. “Then I appropriated these autonomous plates – transformed 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 acquired an international reputation since her participation in the Venice Biennale curated by Harald Szeemann in 1999.