New Artist Spotlight: Bernard Frize at Marian Goodman Gallery
Portrait of Bernard Frize. Courtesy of Marian Goodman Gallery.
“New Artist Spotlight” is a recurring editorial series featuring artists who have recently joined the rosters of Artsy’s gallery partners.
French abstract painter Bernard Frize is fixated on the mechanics of painting. His methodical approach, characterized by its adherence to a set of self-imposed rules, transforms the act of painting into an analytical, almost scientific inquiry. Often working in series, Frize seeks to strip art from its subjectivity, presenting it instead as a result of predefined conditions and procedures.
The artist has recently joined the roster of Marian Goodman Gallery, with plans to showcase his works in Los Angeles this November. Born in Saint-Mandé, France, in 1949, Frize has been a notable figure in the art world for over four decades and today works from his studio in Berlin. His career is a testament to a relentless exploration of painting’s fundamentals, where he questions the role of the artist, the medium, and the process itself.
Frize first earned recognition for this methodology in 1977 with ST 77, an artwork illustrating innumerable, overlapping fine vertical and horizontal lines in a spectrum of colors. Here, the artist debuted his process-oriented practice, where he would create several paintings from the same set of rules. This systematic approach was imagined as a process likened to manual labor.
Among these explorations, Extension 2 (1990) and Aran (1992) have emerged as notable examples from a series of paintings Frize created between 1987 and 2001. For this series, he utilized a 20-centimeter wide brush, divided into eight sections, each loaded with different colors. With this tool, he executed continuous, sinuous gestures across the canvas, resulting in perceived depth and a riot of marbled colors. This series represents the longevity of his series-based practice, often working with one set of rules for several decades.
This approach is also evident in works such as the bright acrylic painting Haun (2019), featuring a five-by-five set of multicolored squares. Even within his paintings, the abstract images are nearly identical, but because of the artist’s strict rule-making, his work emphasizes human error in the face of constraints. This methodology continues to define Frize’s work today, including his recent paintings Lebu and Gise (both 2023), where he paints two peaks at the top and bottom of the canvas. These incandescent paintings evoke dreamlike landscapes, but for Frize, the significance of these paintings is in their technical differences, ranging from color palette to varying brushstrokes.
Frize’s solo exhibitions have been hosted by some of the world’s most prestigious institutions, including the Centre Pompidou in Paris and the Kunstmuseum in Basel. His works are also part of several public collections, such as Tate Modern in London, MUMOK in Vienna, and MOCA in Los Angeles. In addition to Marian Goodman Gallery, the artist is also represented by Perrotin.
