Bernard Frize

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About Bernard Frize

It was in the mid 1970’s, at a time when painting was regarded by many of his contemporaries as being obsolete that Bernard Frize began to focus his attention exclusively on the act of painting. His abstract compositions derived from elaborately constructed rules, carefully choreographed performances which determined entirely the works’ formal composition.

It was in the mid 1970’s, at a time when painting was regarded by many of his contemporaries as being obsolete that Bernard Frize began to focus his attention exclusively on the act of painting. His abstract compositions derived from elaborately constructed rules, carefully choreographed performances which determined entirely the works’ formal composition. In one early series Frize peeled off the coloured skins from pots of paint left open in the studio and applied them over the surface of the canvas, the wet paint on the disks’ undersides acting as adhesive. More recent compositions involve teams of assistants moving their linked brushes across a wet white ground, and like the participants in a may-pole dance, mixing colours and forming interweaving bands of colour as they go. Frize's paintings might then seem to find their place within the rich and familiar territory of 'process painting', their lush brushstrokes acting as an index of these carefully choreographed rituals by which they are created. But there is a further twist to the story, and it is in this that Frize’s work truly stands apart. Close inspection reveals that any trace of material or depth to the painted mark is conspicuously absent. Rather than indexes of the act of painting, Frize presents us with pure images of paint, colour and reflected light. Bernard Frize was born in 1949 in Saint Mandé, France. He lives and works between Paris and Berlin. His work is represented in numerous public collections, including: The Tate Gallery, London; Centre Pompidou, Paris; MUMOK, Vienna; Museo Nacional Centro de Reina Sofia, Madrid; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; and the Kunstmuseums, Basel and Zurich. He has exhibited extensively both in Europe and in the United States including exhibitions at Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, France; Museum Gegenstandsfreier Kunst Landkreis, Cuxhaven, Germany; Westfälisches Landesmuseum für Kunst und Kulturgeschichte, Münster, Germany; Gemeente Museum, La Haye, and de Pont, Tilburg, Holland; S.M.A.K., Gent, Belgium; Kunstmuseum St. Gallen; Kunstmuseum Basel, Switzerland; The Bakersfield Museum of Art and The Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh, USA; Tate St Ives, UK.

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