Pia Fries & Liat Yossifor | Galerie Anita Beckers

Galerie Anita Beckers is pleased to present "Sculptural Surfaces," an exhibition of works by Pia Fries and Liat Yossifor, curated by Ludwig Seyfarth.

The exhibition juxtaposes two painting positions, which could at first be described as abstract or non-figurative. For both painters, however, even the color itself acquires an almost representational and downright sculptural quality. While the Swiss-born Pia Fries (born in 1955), who lives in Düsseldorf, combines color and constellations in a collage-like manner, the color always fills the entire canvas of Los Angeles-based Israeli-born Liat Yossifor (born 1974) and shows the traces of an almost performative painterly action. Last but not least, Pia Fries' dialogue with art historical models opens up diverse and narrative spaces of association. At the same time, due to the different color gradients, several movement impulses interlock. The colorful, wide-ranging color palette in Pia Fries is contrasted by a muted, almost monochrome tint of the entire image field in Liat Yossifor. The gestural progressions are engraved or written directly in the pastose color, although something always seems to be hidden or "overwritten”.

While Liat Yossifor's work is influenced by the gestural abstraction of American painters, as well as deliberately distinguishing itself from their male-expressive habitus, Pia Fries's paintings are more in line with European traditions of informal abstraction, counteracting an out-of-date rhetoric of immediacy. Both artists combine or subvert traditional categories and opposites in their painterly approach: lightness and weight, objectivity and abstraction, surface and depth. Everything takes place on the surface of the picture insofar as it charges itself in a complex manner and becomes the setting for multilayered processes in the truest sense of the word.