Pia Fries Swiss, b. 1955
Pia Fries (b. 1955, Beromünster, Switzerland) makes paintings in which the physical substance of paint, its weight, volume, and consistency, is the primary subject.
The paintings are on white-primed wood panels. Color masses build in relief using brushes, spatulas, rakes, and palette knives. Silkscreened fragments of historical engravings or naturalist prints are integrated alongside, and partially beneath, the painted layers. Unpainted white areas carry equal visual weight to the dense color passages.
Fries has described painting as a response to what the accumulating surface demands, the work directing its own continuation.
The work addresses the materiality of paint as distinct from representation; the simultaneous optical and tactile address of a painted surface; and the altered condition of historical images, particularly engravings by Goltzius and plates by Merian, when made to coexist with paint.
Fries studied with Gerhard Richter at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf (1980–1986) and has been situated within debates around process art and abstraction since the 1990s.
She received the Fred-Thieler Award at the Berlinische Galerie (2009) and has held professorships at the Berlin University of the Arts and the Academy of Fine Arts, Munich. Exhibitions include the Kunstpalast Düsseldorf (2019) and Germanisches Nationalmuseum, Nuremberg (2026).
She lives and works in Düsseldorf and Lucerne.
