Bernard Frize: Dawn comes up so young

Galerie Perrotin presents “Dawn comes up so young,” Bernard Frize’s first solo exhibition at the Gallery in New York and his tenth solo show with the Gallery.

This exhibition consists of new paintings contextualized by historical works from the 90’s and offers a dialogue on the emergence of an image.
Bernard Frize likes to work in series and brings works together in a non homogeneous time. Bernard Frize occupies a unique position in the discourse of abstract painting, due to the austerity of his artistic ideas paired with a simultaneous freedom of implementation.
He loves paradoxes in painting: “In order for chance to work, you have to create the conditions that make chance possible, one of which is having a lot of time. It is a rather complex thing to arrange situations in which you do nothing and things happen by themselves”. Colour is another paradox, for it does “not particularly interest” him, despite its vital raw material for his work. By using the colour in a non-hierarchical, experimental, or technical-mechanical manner, Frize enlights painting as a handicraft, while also discounting the idea of artistic creation. Frize lends his work a certain dynamic through the investigation of painting’s contradictions. He mixes synthetic resin with fluid acrylic paint to avoid all traces of personal touch and the emotional effect of a brush mark. The resulting picture planes, alluring and hermetic at the same time, have become a trademark of his painting style.