Pia Fries Swiss, b. 1955
Pia Fries (b. 1955, Beromünster, Switzerland) makes paintings that treat paint as both image and object, foregrounding its physical capacity to accumulate, conceal, and transform. Working on white-primed wood panels, she builds dense passages of color in relief using brushes, palette knives, spatulas, and custom tools that register the movement of the hand as much as the material itself. Silkscreened fragments drawn from historical engravings and natural history illustrations emerge within these surfaces, alternately embedded beneath and suspended alongside the painted forms.
For Fries, painting proceeds through an ongoing negotiation with its own conditions. Each gesture responds to those that precede it, allowing the work to determine the terms of its continued development. Areas of exposed white ground remain active throughout, functioning not as empty space but as intervals that shape the rhythm and spatial tension of the composition.
Fries studied at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf under Gerhard Richter from 1980 to 1986 and has played a significant role in the development of contemporary abstraction since the 1990s. She received the Fred Thieler Prize in 2009 and has held professorships at the Berlin University of the Arts and the Academy of Fine Arts, Munich. Recent institutional exhibitions include the Kunstpalast, Düsseldorf (2019) and the Germanisches Nationalmuseum, Nuremberg (2026).
She lives and works in Düsseldorf and Lucerne.
