Bernard Frize

Simon Lee Gallery is proud to present new works by the celebrated French artist Bernard Frize. It was in the mid 1970’s, at a time when the medium of 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. With his profound knowledge of Western art history he consciously chose to subvert the act of painting by stripping the medium from its traditional layers of art historical context and, instead, reducing it to its most basic elements: the canvas and the paint. Frize followed the footsteps of great painters like Piet Mondrian and Barnett Newman as he reconsidered the medium’s potential by starting from scratch. In his paintings it is not the artist’s expressive mood or a narrative he wants to convey, but solely the method of painting. This ‘method of painting’ determines the outcome...