Pia Fries: pontes & arbores

The oeuvre of Pia Fries may be understood as a complex arrangement of painterly praxis in which inquiries into materiality, mediality, and pictorial genesis are interwoven in a manner that is situated within an art-historical context and is also highly relevant to contemporary discourse on pictorial theory. Her artistic expression is centered on a procedure of overlapping, transformation, and rearticulation that puts to question—and productively subverts—the long-established dichotomies between abstraction and figuration, photography and painting, handicraft and technical reproduction. Pia Fries’ painting operates in an intermediate space, an epistemic field in which differences are not resolved but are activated.

Ever since 2000, Pia Fries has been integrating silkscreens into her paintings. Early on, this arose out of a self-referential impulse. The artist turned her own material into a motif by creating photographic documentation of clusters of paint that she mixed, layered with a scraper, and arranged to achieve a sculptural quality. The photographs were then integrated into her paintings. Thus, a painting didn’t just reflect on its material foundation; it also thematized the physical presence of the paint itself. Up to a certain point, Pia Fries’ pictures gave thematic treatment to the history of their own development.

Starting in 2016, there was a shift in the focus of Pia Fries’ screen prints that has continued with her current paintings: Emerging in place of the materiality of the paint is the physical ground of the painting, which consists of wood. The elements of the print no longer point primarily to the material of the painting itself; instead, they reference the structural characteristics that define the underlying pictorial surface. Pia Fries works with only a few carefully selected wood motifs that she has recorded photographically over the years and has reused in various paintings. The motif has been printed at different scales on the respective works and has been duplicated upon the robust ground of the painting.

The recurrent motif of wood in Pia Fries’ recent oeuvre functions within this field, not as a stable iconographic signifier, but as a dynamic operator that connects various levels of the picture. Inasmuch as Pia Fries transfers photographs of wooden surfaces onto the picture carrier by means of screen printing, she engenders a complex interweaving of motif, medium, and material. Wood appears simultaneously as a pictorial subject, as a structural pattern, and as a physical resistance. This simultaneity points toward a shift within the logic of the picture: The motif is no longer the representation of something outside; instead, it forms part of an immanent system of painterly relations. It is integrated into a process that aims less at depiction than at transformation.

During her training in 1986 with the acclaimed German artist Gerhard Richter, Pia Fries developed a pronounced sensitivity to the epistemological implications of photographic images. Richter’s oeuvre clearly demonstrates that the photographic element cannot be understood as a transparent access to reality; it is better understood as a medium that filters, encodes, and transforms reality. Pia Fries radicalizes this insight: The photograph functions not as a subordinated model but as an independent protagonist within the painterly process. It structures the pictorial genesis without determining it, even as it introduces an aspect of foreignness—or perhaps more pertinently of resistance—into the painting that simultaneously questions and extends the painting’s autonomy.

A contiguity with the thinking of the philosopher Gilles Deleuze arises here, especially with Deleuze’s concept of difference as a productive force. In Pia Fries’ oeuvre, repetition never functions as identical reproduction. It functions instead as a generative operation that gives rise to difference. The serial variations of the wooden structures—their scaling, fragmentation, and recontextualization—produce a field of relations that eludes any stable attribution of meaning. Thus, the picture becomes a site of intensive processes manifesting forces and dynamics that are to be understood not as representative, but as performative. It is not a matter of representing something but of allowing something to happen—of processes and the ease of an artistic work that is in the flow.

At the same time, Pia Fries’ manner of painting can be read as a critical elaboration of the formalist position of the art critic Clement Greenberg with regard to postwar painting. Whereas Greenberg situates the autonomy of painting first and foremost in its two-dimensionality and specificity as a medium, Pia Fries expands this approach to include the dimensions of materiality and processuality. Flatness is not negated in her perspective; instead, it is both confirmed and undermined through the physical presence of the paint and of the unusual ground of the picture, namely wood. The pastose applications of paint, which are to some extent relief-like, imbue the picture with an object-like quality that extends into space. The picture oscillates between surface and object, between visual appearance and haptic presence.

This tension can also be situated in the context of abstract expressionism and informalism. In the case of Pia Fries, though, it is transformed in a crucial way. The focus is not on immediate expressivity, as it is with Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, or Joan Mitchell, but on the integration of expressivity into a constructive configuration. In Pia Fries’ oeuvre, the gesture is not negated; it is structured, framed, and transferred into a system of rational decisions. In this respect, Pia Fries’ artistic practice could be described as a form of “reflective gesturality” that combines spontaneity and calculation, coincidence and control.

The use of the screen print plays a central role here. As a technically supported procedure, it introduces a distance between artist and image that can be understood as a deliberate decentralization of authorship. The printing process eludes complete control: shiftings, overlappings, and materially induced contingencies are unavoidable. But it is precisely this lack of control that is rendered productive by Pia Fries. She integrates the deviations produced by the technical process into the pictorial structure and makes them a constitutive element of the composition.

In this interconnection between control and contingency, an affinity with Deleuze once again comes to the fore: The picture appears as a force field in which intentional aesthetic assertions and the intrinsic logic of materials interact with each other. In this context, color is not merely a carrier of meaning; it is an active agent within the pictorial process. It possesses formative principles of its own that resist comprehensive control and, for that very reason, display an aesthetic quality.

The deliberate reduction of the range of colors—especially the concentration on black, white, gray, and brown with which she was already experimenting in 2008—fortifies this focus on materiality and structure. Color is not employed primarily as a chromatic value but as a physical substance that asserts itself in space. The color white does not in any way function as a neutral background. The artist repeatedly renders the ground (i.e., the wood) recognizable through processes of omission, which point to white as an active component of the composition. White does not serve as an empty surface (in a certain sense as a nullification of the painting), but rather as a space of possibility that imparts structure to the other pictorial elements and sets them in mutual relation.

A decisive transformation within Pia Fries’ oeuvre started around 2016. The focus of the screen prints increasingly shifted from the substance of paint to the pictorial carrier itself. The wood serves less as a motif; instead, it thematizes the structural condition of the painting itself. The photographed wooden surfaces introduce a specific temporality into the picture: Grooves, incisions, growth rings, and traces of abrasion function as indexes of past processes. In this sense, the material itself becomes the carrier of a history—with the story being told not as a narrative but as a visibly rendered trace.

This indexical characteristic points once again to the photographic element that works as a system of traces in Pia Fries’ oeuvre. But in contrast to classic photography, which is often thought to be a direct depiction of reality, these traces are transferred into a painterly context, where they are transformed. The result is a hybrid image that cannot be unambiguously attributed to a single medium and, precisely through this indefiniteness, its aesthetic power unfolds.

Moreover, the repeated use of the same motifs over extended periods of time—in addition to the accumulations of paint and the current wood motifs, Pia Fries has also worked with silkscreen models of the early Baroque painter, draftsman, and copperplate engraver Hendrick Goltzius—gives rise to a sort of image-immanent memory. In this respect, Pia Fries’ oeuvre can be read as an archive in which motifs, procedures, and materials are stored, varied, and reactivated. This archive is not a static system, however. Rather, it is part of a dynamic process in which every repetition includes a shift. Thus, the individual picture can never be viewed in isolation but must always be considered as part of a larger framework that extends over the entire oeuvre.

Pia Fries likewise conducts a complex renegotiation with respect to the pictorial space. The individual elements of her composition—especially the painterly elements and the silkscreen fragments—are arranged so that they support or overlap each other or enter into a dynamic interrelationship. This causes the pictorial space to appear neither as illusionistic depth nor as mere surface, but instead as a relational structure created by the interactions among its individual components. This gives rise to a pictorially immanent dialogue that is brought to life by the artist. This constructive logic is reminiscent of the way Paul Cézanne worked; in the case of Pia Fries, it is expanded through a medium-related and material dimension.

Pia Fries’ oeuvre can also be understood as a reflection upon the circumstances of contemporary pictorial culture. In an era marked by the overkill of digital images that are defined by their rapidity, their reproducibility, and their surface orientation, Pia Fries insists on the materiality, presence, and duration of the picture. Her postulate that a picture must “be better than its copy” formulates an aspiration that clearly exceeds mere reproduction. The picture should not only be seen but should also be experienced—as an object that offers resistance, requires time, and does not exhaust itself in the quick consumption and overproduction that are typical of contemporary everyday life.

Pia Fries has built an aesthetic practice characterized by extreme theoretical reflectivity and a pronounced sensual presence. It operates at the interfaces between material, medium, and motif, deriving from them a visual language that defies any sort of unambiguous categorization. Her continuous negotiation of control and coincidence, of constructedness and openness brings to light an artistic attitude that understands painting to be a dynamic, never finalized process. It is a field in which thinking and seeing, material and idea, theory and practice are inseparably intertwined.