Pia Fries "Merian s surinam" Solo Exhibition

Immortal, each 80x60 cm, oil and collage, 2008. Pia Fries "Merian s surinam" solo exhibition: on display at Nelson-Freeman Gallery from September 19 to November 6. Born in 1955, Pia Fries is one of today's most representative Swiss artists, currently residing in Berlin, Germany, and a student of renowned painter Gerhard Richter at the Düsseldorf Art Academy. Like her teacher, she treats painting as both subject and constructive material. The artist states: "I am interested in the materiality of things, methods and techniques, the substantiality of painting, its body, weight, and physical resistance."

Pia Fries' painting style emphasizes the materiality of painting itself within a unique rigorous abstract structure. Through refined methodology and tools, particularly the heavy impasto and overlapping application with palette knives, sparse and dense materials and forms are arranged against a pure white background, highlighting strong material tension and texture under contrast, presenting new possibilities for painting.

In this "Merian s surinam" solo exhibition, the artist debuts a new series combining Merian s surinam collages and paintings, consisting of 14 diptychs, continuing to expand new explorations of pictoriality. This series draws inspiration from Maria Sibylla Merian (1647-1717), a 17th-century Dutch naturalist painter, specifically her 1705 illustrated book of South American plants, flowers, and insects. In this new series, she ingeniously incorporates beautifully reproduced images, often torn into irregular halves, constructing the composition based on these image fragments. Under emotional and expressive thick impasto and overlapping layers, colors are highlighted amidst sparse and dense forms with relief effects, revealing the material tension and exquisite pictorial forms of painting. This achieves a perfect dialogue with Maria Sibylla Merian, redefining possible relationships between past and present, and expanding post-modern possibilities for painting. Between figuration and abstraction, material and form, overflowing emotion and extraordinary imaginative space emerge simultaneously. The artist says: "Wandering viewers can establish a chain reaction of associative imagination through visual images and intellectual instinctive reactions to color and form."