NEW YORK, NEW YORK – MILES McENERY GALLERY is pleased to present an exhibition of new paintings by Pia Fries. farnese will open on 18 February at 525 West 22nd Street and will remain on view through 27 March 2021. The exhibition is accompanied by a fully illustrated publication featuring an essay by poet, art critic, and curator John Yau.

Fries reinterprets abstraction by sensationally combining a variety of textures and pigments to create striking and multidimensional gestural compositions. Working with a sophisticated assortment of mediums, Fries alters the way in which the materials interact on her luminous, white wooden surfaces. Her unique ability to transform pictorial space is conveyed through the textured and intricately layered elements of her paintings. The materiality of the applied paint rises from the surface, similar to a relief By interweaving copious amounts of oil paint with screen printed images and geometric structures, Fries produces an intensely visual sense of movement for the viewer to follow.

As John Yau notes in his essay “For more than a decade, Fries has been deeply engaged with the engravings of the innovative Dutch printmaker and draftsman Hendrick Goltzius (1558–1617).” In parapylon and pylon, the two series of paintings included in this exhibition, Fries considers Goltzius’s best-known engraving, The Farnese Hercules, 1592. Goltzius’s print provides a springboard for a series of interconnected explorations for the artist. “The dialogue she engenders delves into the art, materiality, and history of painting while subverting its dominant myth of masculinity,” states Yau.

Fries’s paintings invite close, deliberate examination. Tracing the contours of her gestures, the viewer explores the various textures and materials used to merge an array of energetic colors across a bright void of space. Yau expands on Fries’s critical use of paint, “It takes an immense amount of confidence to leave so much of the painting open and untouched; it takes even more confidence to use white paint on a white field. The interaction of figure (paint and form) and ground (unpainted surface) is an intricate and entrancing dance.” The artist arrives at a complex visual unity through varied means of applying color, unpredictable layers of imagery, and the viscous materiality of her medium.

PIA FRIES (b. 1955, Beromünster, Switzerland) completed her studies in studio art from 1977 to 1980 at the Lucerne University of Applied Science and Arts. From 1980 to 1986 she studied painting under Gerhard Richter at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf.

Recent solo exhibitions include “Pia Fries: picklock manual,” Talley Dunn Gallery, Dallas, TX; “FABELFAKT,” Kunstpalast Düsseldorf, Germany; “corpus transludi,” Mai 36 Galerie, Zürich, Switzerland; “parsen und module,” Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, Paris, France; Gund Gallery, Kenyon College, Gambier, OH; “Pia Fries: vier winde,” Gerhard Altenbourg Award, Lindenau-Museum, Altenburg, Germany; “Hendrick Goltzius and Pia Fries: proteus and polymorphia,” Museum Kurhaus Kleve, Kleve, Germany; “nasen und nauen,” Galerie Ute Parduhn, Düsseldorf, Germany; Moss Arts Center, Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, Blacksburg, VA; “seascapes,” Christopher Grimes Gallery, Los Angeles, CA; “oxiponton,” Galerie Thomas, Munich, Germany, and “weisswirt und maserzug,” Kopfermann-Fuhrmann Stiftung, Düsseldorf, Germany.