Pia Fries in her studio, 2021, Düsseldorf, Germany
(Photo credit: Artemiy Sergeeviç Shokin)
Pia Fries (b. 1955, Beromünster, Switzerland) studied at the Lucerne University of Applied Science and Arts, Lucerne, Switzerland, and at the Academy of the Arts, Düsseldorf, Germany, where she studied under Gerhard Richter. In 1999, she was selected to exhibit in the Venice Biennale. Fries has held a professorship at the Academy of Fine Arts, Munich since 2014.
Fries has been the subject of recent solo exhibitions at Kunsthaus Baselland, Basel, Switzerland; C.G. Boerner, Düsseldorf, Germany; Kienbaum Collection, Cologne, Germany; Miles McEnery Gallery, New York, NY; Talley Dunn Gallery, Dallas, TX; Kunstpalast Düsseldorf, Düsseldorf, Germany; Mai 36 Galerie, Zürich, Switzerland; Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, Paris, France; Gund Gallery, Kenyon College, Gambier, OH; Lindenau-Museum, Altenburg, Germany; Museum Kurhaus Kleve, Kleve, Germany; and Galerie Ute Parduhn, Düsseldorf, Germany.
Her work has been shown in group exhibitions at numerous international institutions including the Centro Cultural de Belém, Lisbon, Portugal; Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston, TX; Gallery of Modern Art, Glasgow, United Kingdom; Josef Albers Museum Quadrat Bottrop, Bottrop, Germany; Kunstmuseum Basel, Basel, Switzerland; Kunstmuseum Bonn, Bonn, Germany; Kunstmuseum St. Gallen, St. Gallen, Switzerland; Morsbroich Museum, Leverkusen, Germany; Museum für Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt am Main, Germany; National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; National Gallery Prague – Kinský Palace, Prague, Czech Republic; Neues Museum Nürnberg, Nuremberg, Germany; and the Seoul National University Museum of Art, Seoul, South Korea.
Her work may be found in the collections of the Detroit Institute of Art, Detroit, MI; FRAC Auvergne, Clermont-Ferrand, France; Josef Albers Museum, Bottrop, Germany; Kunsthaus Zürich, Zürich, Switzerland; Kunstmuseum Bern, Bern, Switzerland; Kunstmuseum Bonn, Bonn, Germany; Kunstmuseum Luzern, Lucerne, Switzerland; Kunstmuseum St. Gallen, St. Gallen, Switzerland; Kunstpalast Düsseldorf, Düsseldorf, Germany; Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, CA; Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, Paris, France; Neues Museum Nürnberg, Nuremberg, Germany; and the Staatsgalerie Stuttgart, Stuttgart, Germany, among others.
Fries lives and works between Düsseldorf and Munich, Germany.
Miles McEnery Gallery is delighted to present an exhibition of works by a selection of artists at the 2022 Edition of EXPO Chicago. Featured artists include Trudy Benson, Tomory Dodge, Beverly Fishman, Pia Fries, Raffi Kalenderian, Tom LaDuke, Markus Linnenbrink, Ryan McGinness, Douglas Melini, Liz Nielsen, Michael Reafsnyder, James Siena, and Patrick Wilson.
Pia Fries is included in the exhibition Print is a Battlefield at Museo Villa dei Cedri.
Pia Fries exhibition durch sieben siebe is on view through August 2023 at Lido Malkasten, Künstlerverein Malkasten.
Alongside works from the 1990s, this exhibition at Kunsthaus Baselland shows Pia Fries' most recent works for the first time in Switzerland. The exhibition is curated by Ines Goldbach and on view through 9 July 2023.
Pia Fries is included in the exhibition Nord — Süd at Kunst Museum Winterthur
Pia Fries: The Limits of Expressionist Abstraction
"It is important to point out that European artists were able to develop independent ways of working within the general language of expressionist abstraction, whose boundaries, at the time, were seemingly endless and open to nuances of all sorts. In Pia Fries’s case, not only was she influenced by current thinking in abstract art, in the body of work described, she links her work to an extended study of Hendrik Goltzius, the Mannerist painter whose etching of Hercules is an inspiration."
NEW YORK – MILES MCENERY GALLERY is delighted to announce its representation of Pia Fries.
Pia Fries reinterprets abstraction by sensationally combining a variety of textures and pigments to create striking and multidimensional gestural compositions. The Swiss-born painter initially studied sculpture in Lucerne, Switzerland, prior to becoming a student of Gerhard Richter at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf in Germany. The artist’s background in sculpture is evident in her practice throughout her wide-ranging body of paintings. Working with a sophisticated assortment of mediums, Fries alters the way in which the materials interact on the canvas. Her unique ability to transform pictorial space is conveyed through the textured and intricately layered elements of her paintings. By layering copious amounts of oil paint on top of transferred images and geometric patterns, Fries produces an intensely visual sense of movement for the viewer to follow.
