bernard frize without remorse - centre pompidoubernard+frize+en.pdf · 2019-05-09 · of ludwig...

BERNARD FRIZE WITHOUT REMORSE

COMMUNICATION AND PARTNERSHIPS DEPARTMENT

PRESS RELEASE

BERNARD FRIZE. WITHOUT REMORSE29 MAY - 26 AUGUST 2019

#ExpoBernardFrize

BERNARD FRIZE. WITHOUT REMORSEMAY 29 - AUGUST 26, 2019GALLERY 3, LEVEL 1

communicationand partnerships department

directorAgnès Benayertelephone00 33 (0)1 44 78 12 [email protected]

press officerMarine Prévottelephone00 33 (0)1 44 78 48 [email protected]

www.centrepompidou.fr

April 2019

EXHIBITION CURATOR

ANGELA LAMPE

Curator, Modern collections, Musée national d'art moderne

PRESS VISITTUESDAY 28 MAY, 2019

11 AM – 1 PM

In the presence of the artist and the curator.

TV shoots and radio interviews on monday 27 May, by appointment.

With the support of

SUMMARY

1. PRESS RELEASE PAGE 3

2. EXHIBITION MAP PAGE 5

3. EXTRACTS FROM THE CATALOGUE PAGE 6 INTERVIEW BETWEEN BERNARD FRIZE AND ANGELA LAMPE (EXTRACTS) « WITHOUT REMORSE » BY ANGELA LAMPE

« THE OMA PARADOX » BY MICHEL GAUTHIER (EXTRACTS)

4. EXHIBITION CATALOGUE PAGE 14

5. PRESS VISUALS PAGE 15

6. LIST OF EXHIBITED WORKS PAGE 19

7. PRACTICAL INFORMATIONS PAGE 23 In media partnership with

Exhibition Bernard Frize May 18 - August 14, 2019

communicationand partnerships department press officerMarine Prévottelephone00 33 (0)1 44 78 48 [email protected]

www.centrepompidou.fr

#ExpoBernardFrize

Bernard FrizeOma, 2007© Centre Pompidou, MNAM-CCI / P.MigeatDist. RMN-GP © ADAGP, Paris

PRESS RELEASEBERNARD FRIZE. WITHOUT REMORSE1 29 MAY - 26 AUGUST 2019GALLERY 3, LEVEL 1

The Centre Pompidou invites Bernard Frize to take over the Gallery 3 space for a major exhibition of his works, more than 15 years after his last exhibition in France at the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris. A major French painter on the international artistic scene, Bernard Frize (born in 1954) has collaborated closely in the creation of this original exhibition. With some sixty artworks presenting the multiple facets of his work, from his beginnings in 1977 up until his most recent creations, the Bernard Frize. Without remorse exhibition proposes a themed itinerary to be taken as the visitor wishes, without directions or hierarchy, breaking with the serial approach for which the artist is known.

For more than 40 years, Bernard Frize, who currently divides his time between Paris and Berlin,

has been constantly questioning pictorial practices and the role of the painter.

At a time marked by virtuality and moving images, he is committed to examining the challenges

of painting in a way few of his contemporaries do. According to the artist, his paintings are

not the expression of a “creative ego,” but follow a formal policy that he imposes on himself:

“there is no place for sensations or feelings here.” Bernard Frize advocates a technical, banal,

sometimes preposterous, and oftentimes absurd, process in opposition to the demiurgic gesture

that he condemns.

1. The French title "Sans repentir" is based on the double meaning of the word repentir in French referring to the act of penance, regret, or remorse, but it is also an art term meaning "to rework" or "retouch".

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The Bernard Frize. Without remorse exhibition invites the visitor to witness the very act of creation,

by revealing the strategies and intellectual challenges that underlie the painter’s works.

Six themes structure an itinerary that is voluntarily paradoxical: With unreason, without effort, with

system, without system, with mastery, without stopping.

While he is mainly known for his serial abstract and conceptual paintings, Bernard Frize has also

incorporated figurative elements in his works since the 1980s. Consequently, in order to highlight the

multiple pictorial investigations behind each work, paintings that are part of the same series will be

exhibited in different sections, each accompanied by a commentary from the artist.

Other little-known aspects of the artist’s artwork will also be presented, such as his photography

work, for example.

Bernard FrizeTravis 2006

Oil on canvas285 × 240 cm

Private collection photo © André Morin

© Bernard Frize/Adagp, Paris 2019

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2. EXHIBITION MAP

PROLOGUE

1. WITH UNREASON 6. WITHOUT STOPPING

5. WITH MASTERY

4. WITHOUT SYSTEM 3. WITH SYSTEM

2. WITHOUT EFFORT

GALLERY 3, LEVEL 1SCENOGRAPHY : CORINNE MARCHAND

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Angela Lampe : Let’s get back to your early days. After a long pause, you returned to your activities in 1977, by simply covering the canvas gridwork in horizontal and vertical coloured lines, as a manual labourer would do. Could we describe this series as an absurd activity or as a reflection of the absurdity of the world ?

Bernard Frize : It is indeed idiotic to do this. It doesn’t really make sense, but instead of describing a world without reason, I’ve described a world whose reason we are searching for. This is why I did it like a monk, carefully repeating the horizontal and vertical lines, because this activity enabled me to look for the reason why I was doing it.

AL : So was the important part the accomplishment of the task and not its meaning?

BF : Absolutely. I see myself as closer to Lewis Carroll than to the total absurdity of Albert Camus. There is definitely some Sisyphus in it nonetheless. I like taking things so literally that they open up to a different way of seeing.

AL : Could we say that you are striving to rid yourself of the question of meaning?

BF : No, I don’t think so. It’s more like a constant search for meaning and yet the meaning is never found. I think that that’s why there are so many different forms in my work. I do not repeat the same thing, but seek different inroads. I establish constraints – an Oulipian dimension – so as not to choose and to be able to keep going.

AL : Was Oulipian thought important for you?

BF : I don’t know. At that stage, I was reading a lot of Ludwig Wittgenstein and Lewis Carroll, but I was caught up in my era. OuLiPo is a good tool for broaching my work, but while I was making things, I didn’t think about it. It was intuitive. (…)

AL : The structure of the exhibition is based on the paradoxes of your work. We were just talking about your way of using systems in your paintings, but at

the same time, there is a sense that you are aiming for their collapse with the help of random effects. What role does chance play in your approach?

BF : Systems sometimes give rise to an absurd result that is the fruit of chance. Reality eventually destroys systems, as in Quelques causes accidentelles et d’autres causes naturelles, Emir, or Drexel, Burnham & Lambert. My work establishes conditions in which chance might intervene. (…)

AL : Are you trying to tame chance, to master it by giving it a form, by placing it at your service? How do you use it? Is chance a destructive agent or a liberating element?

BF : At first, chance intervened by… chance (laughs). Then I tried to tame it and use it. So it depends on which phase of the work I’m in. Since I work in series a lot, chance is also useful to get out of the series to find a new angle.

AL : So it’s liberating?

BF : Yes, it serves to get out of the system in which, sometimes, I’m taming it.

AL : Another paradoxical approach.

BF : Yes, that’s it, every time (laughs). (…)

AL : Another aspect of your technical mastery for me is your treatment of the surface. The use of acrylic resin lends it a glazed, smooth, almost waxed appearance, a surface that seems almost encapsulated, as though unattainable. We get the sense that the painting is no longer accessible. Is your painting melancholic?

BF : I don’t know. Unlike American painting or the kind of art that has become increasingly immersive, I have always wanted to paint in a way that is loyal in its means and loyal with respect to the spectator, who must not feel dominated by my paintings. They can be considered at a human-to-human level. They are neither overwhelming nor immersive. To do this, I wanted to seal the painting in an almost photographic material. It was important to me that my painting be very distant.

3. EXTRACTS FROM THE CATALOGUE INTERVIEW BETWEEN BERNARD FRIZE AND ANGELA LAMPE (EXTRACTS)

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AL : You create a distance.

BF : Yes, it is a way of being loyal with respect to the spectator. I respect the person opposite who has all the tools and weapons to contradict or adhere to my work. (…)

AL : The importance of the continuous line also involves a performative act, a painting without pentimenti. You’ve admitted you discard failed artworks. You don’t cheat. Could we speak of a work ethic, or even an ethical painting – transparent and legible, created with honest means?

Bernard FrizeRami1993Acrylic, mother-of-pearl, ink, and resin on canvas205 × 194 cmPrivate collectionPhoto © André Morin© Bernard Frize/Adagp, Paris 2019

BF : Yes, for me these are indispensable conditions for my activity. I’m not Houdini, I’m not an illusionist, I don’t do magic tricks but things that are totally realistic.

AL : When do you deem that a series is finished or exhausted, or should we say dead?

BF : When it no longer generates any other ideas. Generally, I stop a series when it has led me to a new idea and I pick it up again when I have the feeling that it can still take me elsewhere, that it isn’t over.

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« WITHOUT REMORSE » BY ANGELA LAMPE

Essentially, I set myself rulesin order to be totally free.

Georges Perec

For over forty years, Bernard Frize has developed a body of work based on constraints. From his first series, which consisted of repeatedly retracing the framework of the canvas to the point of saturation with the finest of paintbrushes, the rigger, to his most recent painting, LedZ (2018), built on antagonisms between horizontal and vertical surfaces, the act of creating is subjected to a pre-established set of rules, the operative mode of a protocol freely chosen by the artist. Frize’s paintings are not intended as the expression of a creative self, they simply derive from the application of an impersonal formal system. “Feelings and emotions do not belong here.”Disapproving of the demiurgical gesture, the artist counters this with the implementation of a banal, occasionally zany, and often absurd technical process.What meaning must be given to the painter’s self-imposed obligation to entirely fill the surface of a canvas with a single brushstroke, performed freehand and in a single colour? Or to representing all the possibilities of movement available to the knight on a chessboard, as in his painting Spitz (1991) ?

That such formal shackles can be as liberating as they are creative has been demonstrated in the works of the OuLiPo group (Ouvroir de littérature potentielle). By forcing themselves to follow a certain number of rules, its members are able to thwart routine, finding new and surprising approaches, such as that of writing a book without the letter e (Georges Perec with La Disparition [1969]), writing a text containing no letters with tail (g, j, p, q, and y), or a poem whose words all start with the same letter. Texts written with constraints attract attention to the writing itself, to the question of “how?”, the way in which it is made, constructed, woven, and combined. While the utterance mutates into a riddle, its author is transformed into an artisan of the verb, into a language labourer concerned with accomplishing a task. This has been exactly what has interested Bernard Frize from the outset: working on his painting like a worker following a protocol step by step, “so as not to choose”.

The idea of insisting on the liberating effect of a constraint thus seemed an interesting pathway for the conception of a Bernard Frize exhibition, which rethinks the traditional format of the retrospective, usually structured through the chronology of the work. Our thought process started with the choice of a spatial constraint that quite quickly imposed itself: the organisation of the picture rails in the form of a grid. Not only is the grid the ultimate modernist schema, but it is also a recurrent form of composition in Frize’s painting. Instead of selecting a body of works representative of the artist’s oeuvre, which would have determined the staging of our empty floorspace, the approach here was the opposite: to fill the boxes of a pre-existing architecture. Our goal was to create a free thematic pathway, without direction or hierarchy, that scrambles the serial approach for which the artist is known. This was done in order to bring the visitor into the very act of creation by revealing the intellectual strategies and challenges that underpin Frize’s works.

The six section themes – With Unreason, Without Effort, With System, Without System, With Mastery, Without Stopping – were chosen for their accessibility and clarity. The application of an arbitrary rule whereby the titles that begin with with must alternate with those starting with without refers to the paradoxes and contradictions inherent to the artist’s practice. It was important for us to present paintings from a single series under different thematic angles, not only to create surprising déjà vu effects during the visit, but above all to emphasise the vanity of an immutable classification, the illusion of any hermetic system. These constraints gave us the freedom to rearrange Bernard Frize’s work without too much gravitas.

IIt seemed pertinent that the exhibition opens with the importance of folly in Bernard Frize’s approach. By covering the surface of a canvas with a mesh of horizontal and vertical lines in an infinite number of colours, as he did in 1977 (st 77, n°2), the artist embarked on a quest: to find a meaning for his practice, which would never transpire. Only the absurdity of a long and painful execution

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was left to him, which prevailed over the meaning of the artwork. The primacy of the process over the result, which the artist says did not much interest him, 6 also characterises the second seminal series, entitled Suite Segond (1980), which introduced a new dimension, just as essential in his work – that of random events.

By chance, the artist started to use the dried films of unsealed paint tins: he arranged them on the surface of the canvas, thus creating a painting that was almost self-generated and whose alterations of material – folds, streaks, and cracks – were produced by accident. Another constraint for this exhibition is that each section is introduced by an artwork from one or another of these two polysemic series.

Reworking children’s drawings (Vue d’au-dessus, 1985), showing the signified versus the signifier (Article japonais, 1985), creating crazy systems (Frappant, 2005), or baptising his paintings after the names of RER trains (Rami, 1993) or financial ratings agencies (Standard and Poor’s, 1987) are all various strategies established by the artist to reliably thwart reason. Efficiency and economy of means play a fundamental role for Frize, and they have led him to organise his indolence. Often helped by chance, he seeks to capitalise on the creative act by choosing effective tools, such as the “roulor” (ST78, 1978) that adorns the whole surface of the canvas with a single gesture, or he devises protocols for the simultaneous creation of two artworks (Margarita, 1991 and Continent, 1993). Even his photographic practice consists of gleaning motifs that are delivered to him, with no great effort, through the random wandering of his gaze. One of the constitutive paradoxes of Frize’s work is linked to his way of creating systems that he does not, or no longer, believes in. While, on the one hand, he establishes complex procedures to fill the canvas, such as with the helping hands of a few assistants (Rassemblement, 2003), or to create all-over ornamental structures based on a single line of colour (No 10, 2005), on the other hand, he takes great pleasure in dissolving his grids under our informed eye. Sometimes, he even exacerbates a system to the extreme, for instance exposing the viewer to blinding effects with his blurred painting Oma (2007), made with an airbrush. Overriding all

else, optical folly interferes with geometrical rationality.

In Frize’s paintings, entropy is always underway, propulsed by stratagems that use technical impacts and random effects as disruptive agents. The major series Quelques causes accidentelles et d’autres causes naturelles (1985) represents in this sense a manifesto work, which reveals how systems infested with games of chance lead to absurd results. “Reality eventually destroys the system”, concludes the artist.

Another paradox, while aspiring to a banal and ordinary kind of painting, Frize creates canvases that are striking, owing to their great technical mastery or even virtuosity. Might we even dare to call it “beauty”? While their ornamental quality makes them similar to the Taiwanese fabrics that the artist avidly collects, their chromaticism recalls the technical prowess of sixteenth-century mannerist painters, the inventors of colore cangiante. The ease with which Frize seems to create his perfectly executed paintings confers a cool elegance to them, a distance that, since the mid-1980s, has been reinforced by the glazed and flat aspects of the painted surface, due to the use of an acrylic resin. These matte paintings appear to us like images reproducing a kind of painting whose splendour has become inaccessible.

With good reason, Frize evokes the connection between ornament and death. No mark betrays the painter’s gesture. The body of ornamental artworks thus stands out within his overall work, which, from the outset, has been based on performativity.

The act of tracing a continuous line that is drained of its pigments onto the canvas stems from the idea not only of recording the length of application, but also of presenting the pictorial event in a fully transparent way. Refusing to do any subsequent work or touch-up on his paintings, which are created in a single, unrepentant session, Frize affirms a work ethic.

The viewer can follow the brushstroke as it is depleted, before it is reborn with a new load of paint, and so on. Staging endless lines refers to the practice of open seriality in Frize’s work. The rule involving the creation of variants generated from a

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protocol gives him the motivation, as he says, “to avoid getting sidetracked, to enable me to keep going.” In other words, it is the constraint that liberates him from any personal decision.

Although Bernard Frize questions the fundaments of the experience of painting, the key element in his work is not to exalt constraints or flaunt technique, but to place both in service to this mystery that painting remains, in spite of everything. Our exhibition thus presents one of the medium’s greatest current advocates, with all of his strengths, impasses, brilliance, and obsessions. But without remorse.

Bernard FrizeArticle japonais

1985Crackle lacquer, oil, and resin on canvas

99 × 80 × 3 cmA.-M. and M. Robelin Collectionphoto © François Maisonnasse© Bernard Frize/Adagp, Paris

2019

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[…] The work of Bernard Frize occupies a choice position within the rich history of painting by protocol.

What nevertheless distinguishes it from many others is the multiplicity of processes that, over the years, have governed his practice. Frize did not entrust the fate of his painting to just one, but to a multitude of protocols.

This diversity is indeed one of the characteristics of his art, which can be demonstrated easily, by recalling just a few of these protocols. There is one, which gave rise in the early 1990s to a series of remarkable canvases, such as Vick, Vony, Mona, Romi, and Emir, in which an emulsion of two colours is applied in horizontal stripes with an 8-cm brush on a canvas that is then lifted in such a way that the excess runs vertically from its initial position, separating the two colours from one another; the canvas then dries and is placed horizontally. There is another, inaugurated in 1990 as a capital variant on the Suite Segond of 1980 with the idea of a self-made painting formed by drying an unsealed paint tin: the contents of several dozen tins of different colours are poured into a tray; as soon as a thin layer has accumulated on the surface, the painter samples it and transfers it to a canvas; the operation is repeated as many times as possible, since the distribution and combination of colours are not the same at every depth of the container and the removal of the solidified film of paint causes slight perturbations to the liquid, hence the paintings thus obtained are all different.

Then there is the protocol that was perfected in 1986 for a group of paintings, including 49 % juste 49 % faux : roaming over the boxes of a grid in a single gesture, with a “bouquet” of paintbrushes dipped in various colours; as the bouquet approaches the edge of the canvas, so as not to interrupt the action, it performs a turn to continue its route. One more?

Six hands painting a canvas, which exchange brushes between them in certain places, without ever lifting them from the canvas (Gabarit, Canon, Modèle, Patron, all from 1998).

There is no need for further examples to understand everything that separates Frize’s notion of the protocol from the kind whereby a form of painting believes it has found the (or at least its own) truth. For Frize, while it is indeed about having the least decisions to make via these operative modes, it is not so that painting – once rid of the painter – can finally approach its own essence and present itself in some “zero-degree” form of itself. The diversity of the protocols signals that the outlook is not, to use Jean-Luc Godard’s famous phrase, to produce just (accurate) paintings, but just (simply) paintings. […]

The protocol-based diversity of Frize’s work also attests to the desire for a withdrawal, a distrust with respect to the unifying and overarching authority that is the subject-artist. Cindy Sherman multiplies her disguises, while Frize multiplies his protocols. In both cases, it is the subject, artist, or more specifically, painter, who displays a secondary status with respect to reproduced images and stereotypes or implemented protocols. Therein lies a kind of inversion of the order of factors that specifies Frize’s position within the history of pictorial materialism: the painter does not withdraw so that painting can express itself; painting is asked to express itself so that the painter can withdraw. This inversion dismisses any essentialist interpretation of Frize’s art. The painter’s passivity is no guarantee of the painting’s manifestation of its constitutive parameters; it is surely the latter that supports the former. […]

« THE OMA PARADOX » BY MICHEL GAUTHIER Curator, Contemporary Collections, Musée national d'art moderne

(EXTRACT)

Bernard FrizeSuite Segond 120F

1980Urethane alkyd lacquer on

canvas130 × 195 cm

Kunstmuseum Basel © Bernard Frize/Adagp, Paris

2019Photo © Kunstmuseum Basel,

Martin P. Bühler

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Frize clearly understood the historic injunction made to painting to wholeheartedly abandon its usual practices, knowledges, and signifier tropes so as to only present its components in the reality of their material and the operations to which that material is subjected. But his answer quickly took a paradoxical turn. Possibly more than any other of his works, the paintings founded on the separation of the two components of an emulsion enable the paradox lodged at the heart of the artist’s poetics to be measured. The original programme of these pieces is in the most unquestionably materialist vein: the idea is effectively to confront a composite pictorial material with the laws of gravity. As for the painting resulting from this programme, it resembles a kind of iconic whimsy. In the play of streaks and colours, the gaze discerns landscapes that are now mountainous, now maritime, and Asian at times. The materiological chemistry of the protocol has transformed into an alchemy of the imagination.

The same paradoxical relationship of the protocol to its result is observed in the case of the “skins” sampled from the surface of the container into which several colours, sometimes by the dozen, have been poured. Once again, the initiative has been left up to the material: the lacquers, designed for interior decoration, are distributed in the tray as the respective densities of their pigments dictate. These paintings that make themselves, after a long drying time, while the painter was far from them, these paintings derived from a banal gesture, stripped of any intention, “like when you put milk in a pot, without really paying attention”, turn out to have great chromatic subtly and astonishing formal refinement. The distribution of the spatter on their surface seems to be the fruit of an expressive desire and an aesthetic concern that are the appanage of the most gifted artists. Yet it was in the solitude of a urethane alkyd soup that these highly convincing masterpieces of abstract expressionism were born. There is a discrepancy between the primal materialism of the initial act and the coded beauty of the pictorial dénouement. […]

While many of Ellsworth Kelly’s or Brice Marden’s works respect the rule whereby there is only one colour per subjectile, a significant number of Frize’s paintings are created in a single brushstroke. In the former cases, it is a question of warding off the risk of illusionism that inevitably stems from a surface functioning as a receptacle for a figure or a composition. In the latter case, again, it is a matter of limiting the number of

decisions to make and accepting all of the consequences, possibly even illusionistic ones, that this single brushstroke may elicit. A series of paintings, including Spitz (1991), was created in one stroke with a bouquet of a good dozen paintbrushes, following the meanders of an ornamental design or a composition taken from a geometry manual. Since the background resin is (too) damp, the colours tend to be diluted and combine, all the more so in that the paintbrush bouquet’s long trajectory across the canvas leads it to cross over lines that it traced previously and thus accentuate the chromatic and figural ruin underway.

A single brushstroke to provoke a brown disaster and superlatively “fail” a painting.While the single-brushstroke technique enables some beautiful failures, it has another consequence that a painting like Made (1986) emphasises. This painting is presented as a grid drawn with a single stroke from a bouquet of paintbrushes dipped in several colours.

So as not to interrupt the gesture, the bouquet makes a turn before reaching the edge of the canvas, in order to carry on to the next line of the grid. Since the vertical lines were done after the horizontal lines and consequently passed over them, and since the ductility of the hair leads a given paintbrush to disappear under another during changes in direction, the space of the painting hollows out – depth effects thus occur despite the fact that the painter has only drawn a grid in a single movement. The single brushstroke might have been mistaken for a guarantee of flatness. Made shows otherwise. It is an effective agent of illusion. Interlude (1988) plays on the same phenomenon, on the model not of the grid, but of the knot: the multiple interlacing drawn with a single brushstroke gives rise to a complex sense of relief. It recalls the series Knots, gouaches presenting complex entanglements of threads, which Anni Albers undertook in the late 1940s. […]

We recall Rosalind Krauss’s analysis: “In the flatness that results from its coordinates, the grid is the means of crowding out the dimensions of the real and replacing them with the lateral spread of a single surface .” It is very hard to say the same thing about the grid in Made. By exhibiting the chronology of its evolution and the order of drawing of its lines, a grid such as this, unlike its modernist ancestor, creates an illusion of depth. That the grid, in which modernism saw an ideal instrument for exalting the planarity of painting, thus comes to

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endow the space of the painting with a third dimension is not the least of the paradoxes attached to Frize’s corpus.

With Oma (2007), a painting created with an airbrush, the blurriness of the lines adds to the distribution of the planes within the depth of field. Since the late 1950s, thanks to Wojciech Fangor’s painting, abstraction had made a strange pact with lack of focus. Geometric rationality seemed to have abdicated in favour of optical folly. But, in the case of Oma, it is no longer circles or waves that are disturbed, but the grid itself, the talisman of modernism. Is this spatial illusionism and this blur in the grid not a manifestation of maniera? Naturally, it is not a matter of applying to Frize’s art the categories – optical subjectivity, manipulation of proportions, addition of successive planes – with which Walter Friedlaender attempted, in his day, to take stock of the period that inaugurated the anticlassicism of Pontormo, Rosso, and Parmigianino. The classicism from which Frize distinguishes himself undoubtedly has nothing to do with that which the two Florentines and the North Italian emancipated themselves from. It is pictorial materialism under the aegis of formalism that is attacked by the mannerism in question. Concerning the works Aran and Eixen (1992), whose fields are saturated with magnificent multicoloured circumvolutions obtained by way of a

large brush lazily drifted over the canvas, Frize talks about “an uncanny focal length” and “terrifying space, with no bearings”: characteristics often acknowledged in sixteenth-century mannerism.

This is perhaps the unique position that Frize occupies in the history of painting from the past half-century: a malfunction of classicism that this formalist materialism represents, for which the focus on the act of painting must not infringe upon the rules of modernist decorum. For Frize’s paintbrushes, that is their virtue: there are no aesthetic prohibitions. In their field, illusionism and materialism are not incompatible. It is time we got used to it.

Bernard FrizeOma 2007Acrylic on canvas240,5 × 310 cmCentre Pompidou, Musée national d’art moderne, Parisphoto © Centre Pompidou,MNAM-CCI/PhilippeMigeat/Dist. RMN-GP© Bernard Frize/Adagp, Paris 2019

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4. EXHIBITION CATALOGUE

EXHIBITION CATALOGUEBERNARD FRIZE. WITHOUT REMORSE

Edited by Angela Lampe

Centre Pompidou Editions / Dilecta Editions

Format 22,5 x 30 cm / 208 pages

Bilingual english – french

35 €

SUMMARY

FOREWORDSerge Lasvignes

PREFACEBernard Blistène

WITHOUT REMORSEAngela Lampe

FACTS OF THE MATTERJessica Stockholder

with unreasonInterview between Bernard Frize and Angela

Lampe (Part 1)

without effortInterview (Part 2)

with systemInterview (Part 3)

without systemInterview (Part 4)

with masteryInterview (Part 5)

without stoppingInterview (Part 6)

THE OMA PARADOXBy Michel Gauthier

BAGATELLES (FOR BERNARD FRIZE) By Jean-Pierre Criqui

WHAT AND WHY AND WHEN AND HOW AND WHERE AND WHO By Bernard Frize

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5. PRESS VISUALS

01. Bernard FrizeST78 n°2, 1978Urethane alkyd lacquer on canvas35 × 27 cmPrivate collectionphoto © Centre Pompidou, MNAM-CCI/ Philippe Migeat/Dist. RMN-GP© Bernard Frize/Adagp, Paris 2019

02. Bernard FrizeSuite Segond 120F, 1980Urethane alkyd lacquer on canvas130 × 195 cmKunstmuseum Basel © Bernard Frize/Adagp, Paris 2019Photo © Kunstmuseum Basel, Martin P. Bühler

03. Bernard FrizeArticle japonais, 1985Crackle lacquer, oil, and resin on canvas99 × 80 × 3 cmA.-M. and M. Robelin Collectionphoto © François Maisonnasse© Bernard Frize/Adagp, Paris 2019

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04. Bernard Frize9c. Nuage sur la côte Atlantique, 1988Silver gelatine black-and-white photograph37,5 × 27,5 cm Private collectionphoto © Centre Pompidou, MNAM-CCI/Philippe Migeat/Dist. RMN-GP© Bernard Frize/Adagp, Paris 2019

05. Bernard FrizeInterlude, 1988Acrylic and resin on canvas200 × 180 cmPrivate collectionphoto © Centre Pompidou, MNAM-CCI/ Philippe Migeat/Dist. RMN-GP© Bernard Frize/Adagp, Paris 2019

06. Bernard FrizeSpitz, 1991Acrylic and resin on canvas254,5 × 361,5 cmTate: Purchased with assistance from the Patrons of New Art throught the Tate Gallery Foundation 1996photo © Tate, London 2019© Bernard Frize/Adagp, Paris 2019

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07. Bernard FrizeRami, 1993Acrylic, mother-of-pearl, ink, and resin on canvas205 × 194 cmPrivate collection© Bernard Frize/Adagp, Paris 2019Photo © André Morin

08. Bernard FrizeRassemblement, 2003 Acrylic and resin on canvas215 × 340 cmPrivate collection photo © André Morin© Bernard Frize/Adagp, Paris 2019

09. Bernard FrizeIsaac, 2004 Oil on canvas190 × 220,5 cm Private collection photo © Bernard Frize© Bernard Frize/Adagp, Paris 2019

10. Bernard FrizeN° 10, 2005Acrylic and resin on canvas185 × 185 cmPinault Collection photo © Bernard Frize© Bernard Frize/Adagp, Paris 2019

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12. Bernard FrizeOma, 2007Acrylic on canvas240,5 × 310 cmCentre Pompidou, Musée national d’art moderne, Parisphoto © Centre Pompidou, MNAM-CCI/Philippe Migeat/Dist. RMN-GP© Bernard Frize/Adagp, Paris 2019

11. Bernard FrizeTravis, 2006 Oil on canvas285 × 240 cm Private collection photo © André Morin© Bernard Frize/Adagp, Paris 2019

13. Bernard FrizeLedZ, 2018Acrylic and resin on canvas280,5 × 522,5 cmCourtesy Perrotin & Bernard Frize photo © Claire Dorn© Bernard Frize/Adagp, Paris 2019

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6. LIST OF EXHIBITED WORKSst 77

1977

Oil on canvas

100 × 100 cm

Private collection

st 77 n° 1

1977

Oil on canvas

14 × 14 cm

Private collection

st 77 n° 2

1977

Oil on canvas

100 × 100 cm

Private collection

st 77 n° 3

1977

Oil on canvas

14 × 14 cm

Private collection

st 77 n° 4

1977

Oil on canvas

14 × 14 cm

Courtesy of the artist and Simon Lee Gallery

London and Hong Kong

st 77 n° 6

1977

Oil on canvas

14 × 14 cm

Private collection

st 77 n° 7

1977

Oil on canvas

14 × 14 cm

Courtesy of the artist and Simon Lee Gallery

London and Hong Kong

ST78 n° 1

1978

Urethane alkyd lacquer on canvas

24 × 19 cm

Private collection

ST78 n° 3

1978


38 × 46 cm

Private collection

Suite Segond LD

1980


33 × 46 cm

Courtesy Perrotin & Bernard Frize

Suite Segond 120F

1980


130 × 195 cm

Kunstmuseum Basel

Suite Segond N°60F

1981


130 × 97 cm

Private collection

Marx Dormoy

1983

Oil on canvas

146 × 114 cm

Private collection

Working / on / figures / including / total / sales

(Los Angeles)

1984

Silver gelatine colour photography

30 × 40 cm

Private collection

Vue d’au-dessus

1985

Acrylic and resin on canvas

190.5 × 140 cm

Private collection

Article japonais

1985

Crackle lacquer, oil, and resin on canvas

99 × 80 × 3 cm

A.-M. and M. Robelin Collection

20

Quelques causes accidentelles et d’autres causes

naturelles (A), (B), (C), (D)

1985

Coffee grounds, paraloid, and oil on canvas,

four paintings 157 × 162.5 cm, FNAC 94606

On permanent loan from the Centre national des arts

plastiques to the musée d’art moderne et contemporain

de la Ville de Strasbourg since 1998

49% juste 49% faux

1986


160 × 140 × 2.5 cm

Musée d’art moderne et contemporain de Saint-Étienne

Métropole

Sans titre (made)

1986


97.5 × 77.5 cm

Private collection

Standard and Poor’s

1987


200 × 170 × 3 cm

Fonds régional d’art contemporain Bretagne Collection

Arbitrage

1987

Pigment, acrylic, and resin on canvas

220 × 180 cm

Musée d’art moderne de la Ville de Paris

Drexel, Burnham & Lambert

1987


267 × 385 cm

Private collection - On permanent loan to the Musée de

Grenoble since 2003 - DP 2003-1

9c. Nuage sur la côte Atlantique

1988

Silver gelatine black-and-white photograph

37.5 × 27.5 cm

Private collection

Interlude

1988


200 × 180 cm

Private collection

Secrets militaires

1989

Enamel on sheet metal

117.5 × 117.5 cm


Six premières épreuves

1990


Six paintings measuring 80 × 93 cm

Private collection

Margarita

1991


87 × 100 cm

Private collection

80 F

1991

Acrylic, ink, mother-of-pearl, and resin on canvas

114 × 146 cm

Private collection, Wien

Spitz

1991


254,5 × 361,5 cm

Tate : Purchased with assistance from the Patrons of New

Art throught the Tate Gallery Foundation 1996

Continent

1993


160 × 140 cm

Private collection, Paris

Emir

1993

Acrylic, mother-of-pearl, ink, and resin on canvas

208 × 195 cm

Private collection

Suite au rouleau

1993


Eight paintings measuring 190 × 140 cm

Centre Pompidou, Musée national d’art moderne, Paris

Rami

1993

Acrylic, mother-of-pearl, ink, and resin on canvas

205 × 194 cm

Private collection

21

Teeny

1998


146 × 114 cm

Wilma Lock, St. Gallen, Switzerland

NBCa

1998

Acrylic on canvas

92 × 73 cm

The “M” art Foundation, Belgium

Unimixte

1999


220 × 180 cm

Private collection

Heawood (dessus/dessous)

1999

Polyurethane lacquer on polyester and fibreglass

Two elements measuring 140 × 84 × 23 cm each

Musée d’art moderne de la Ville de Paris

Opale

2001


220 × 178 cm

Emmanuelle and Didier Saulnier Collection

Haricots peints

2001

Silver gelatine colour photograph

55 × 54 cm

Private collection

Rassemblement

2003


215 × 340 cm

Private collection

Jacob

2004

Oil on canvas

190 × 220 cm

Private collection

Isaac

2004

Oil on canvas

190 × 220,5 cm

Private collection

Megi

2004


177 × 220 cm

Private collection

Terah

2004

Oil on canvas

190 × 220 cm

Private collection, Italia

Frappant

2005

Foam, polyester, forex, etc

100 × 100 cm

Private collection

Suite à onze n° 18

2006


165 × 165 cm

Private collection

Travis

2006

Oil on canvas

285 × 240 cm

Private collection

Damier

2006


165 × 165 cm

Private collection

Perma

2006


132 × 174 cm


Oma

2007

Acrylic on canvas

240.5 × 310 cm

Centre Pompidou, Musée national d’art moderne, Paris

Piso

2009


185 × 185 cm

Private collection

22

Wig

2009


160 × 140 cm

Private collection

9b. Vue de l’autoroute A3

2009


55 × 55 cm

Private collection

9a. Colonnes peintes du Musée d’art moderne

de la Ville de Paris

2009


55 × 55 cm

Private collection

Atil

2009

Oil on canvas

202.5 × 181 cm

Private collection

Mailles

2012


170 × 170 cm

Private collection

Slandre

2014


180 × 160 cm

Private collection

Aikogi

2014


190 × 160 cm

Private collection

LedZ

2018


280.5 × 522.5 cm


Oude

2018


100 × 100 cm

Private collection

23

PRACTICAL INFORMATIONS

ADMISSION AND PRICES

AT THE SAME TIME AT THE CENTRE POMPIDOU

IN PARIS

PREHISTORIC TIMES A MODERN ENIGMAMAY 8 - SEPTEMBER 16, 2019GALLERY 1, LEVEL 6

DORA MAARJUNE 5 - JULY 29, 2019GALLERY 2, LEVEL 6

CAO FEIHXJUNE 5 - AUGUST 26, 2019GALLERY 4, LEVEL 1

FRANCIS BACON.EN TOUTES LETTRES SEPTEMBER 11, 2019 – JANUARY 20, 2020GALLERY 2, LEVEL 6

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IN METZ

L’AVENTURE DE LA COULEUR ŒUVRES PHARES DU CENTRE POMPIDOUUNTIL JULY 22, JUILLET 2019GRANDE NEF

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IN MÁLAGA

UN PAYS NOUVEAU, HENRI MATISSE (1869-1954) UNTIL JUNE 9, 2019

JIM DINE JULY 10 – SEPTEMBER 29, 2019


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AT THE MUSEUM

GALERIES DU 20E SIECLEMAY 22 - SEPTEMBER 2, 2019 ESPACE FOCUS, MUSEUM, LEVEL 5

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EXHIBITION CURATOR

Angela LampeCurator, Modern collections, Musée national

d'art moderne

THE EXHIBITION

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Anne-Claire Gervais

Centre Pompidou, 75191 Paris cedex 04

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Opening times: every day from 11 a.m. to 9 p.m., except Tuesdays and May 1st.

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B E R N A R D F R I Z E

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