Pia Fries

Pia Fries combines a gluttonous love of thick paint with an energetic pleasure in driving it across the picture plane, so that one paint cluster leads or smears into another. More recently she has begun to deploy collage elements, heightening this 'pinball' method of composition in which paint dialogues with print. Dave Hickey writes of Fries' painting that "their exuberance promises the comforts of expression and delivers the randomized, chemical residue of industrial culture." This beautifully made volume from Richter surveys the Swiss-born painter's works from 1990 to 2007, and is therefore the broadest overview of her sensuous art to date.