Bernard Frize
Käthe Kollwitz Prize 2015
The Akademie der Künste is honouring the work of French artist Bernard Frize with this year’s Käthe Kollwitz Prize. To mark the occasion, the Akademie is presenting a special exhibition dedicated to a selection of Bernard Frize’s paintings produced in Berlin since 1993. His medium-sized canvases and large-scale works follow his own systems and rules, informed by an approach as sensory as it is conceptual. As Frize says, “A painting is an object hung on the wall waiting for people to come and activate it.” Even where his colour systems appear surprisingly simple, the compositions themselves prove to be highly sophisticated. The vertical and horizontal strands of colour, for example, obey fixed rules that are inherently logical, but which solely reference the work itself.
