Artifacts: Pia Fries

Pia Fries is a swiss painter born in 1955 in Beromunster, Switzerland. In 1980 she studied sculpture in Lucerne and painting in 1986 under Gerhard Richter at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf—the Arts Academy of the city of Düsseldorf, Germany. Gerhard Richter is a German visual artist who makes abstract and photorealistic paintings as well as photographs of glass pieces. She then taught at various academies and is now a professor of painting and graphics at the Academy of Fine Arts, Munich.

Fries is interested in “the materialism of things, in the means and in the techniques, in the substance of the paint, in its body, its weight and its physical resistance”. She creates pieces with contrasting spaces of blankness and filled colorful chaos in order to create cohesive and heterogenous art—art with different elements and characters. Her goal is to create a “visual language” through her work by making it impressionable to the viewers. All of her work is abstract—filled with varying shapes and colors and textures—but the pieces feel calm and the elements work together to make one, united image. I find the way in which she makes art so creative and difficult in that she experiments with mediums—their weight and texture and color—to create unique pieces instead of attempting to recreate a recognizable image. There is such a great amount of detail and variety packed into her pieces but every element seems to have an intentional purpose which creates her skillful and individual style and this is why I am drawn to Fries’s art.

Fries's Work