Bernard Frize: Colour Divides

Simon Lee Gallery is proud to present an exhibition of new paintings by Bernard Frize, his third with the gallery. Unusually for Frize, this exhibition consists of paintings from a single series. They re-visit an earlier work; a labyrinthine painting made in 1986 on the ceiling of the Musée d’art Moderne de la Ville de Paris. “In 1986 I painted the ceiling of a room of the Musée d’art Moderne de la Ville de Paris. Inspired, perhaps unconsciously, by the upper part of the walls of the Villa des Mystères, and especially by my amazement at the possibility of painting in several colours applied together on a wide brush, I filled the ceiling with paths and labyrinths until there was overhead a mass of colour as complex as the convolutions of a human brain. Over the years I made several attempts to recapture the sensations which this ceiling had given...