Peter Frie: Vyerna / The Views
Galerie Forsblom 17.2.–19.3.2023
Known for his landscapes, Peter Frie (b.1947) is a painter who always works from memory. His primary interest lies not in the realm of realism – at least not in the form of faithful mimesis – but rather in emotional truth. Working from memory heightens the authenticity of his emotional responses, and his paintings also prompt viewers to revisit their own memories and experiences. The encounter with the landscapes is intimately personal. The scenes he captures on canvas are steeped in feelings and memory traces that are ineffable and unnecessary to try to verbalize. The endless sea and the low-hanging sky blending with the horizon offer a timeless point of interface with which anyone can identify.
One of the remarkable things about Frie’s landscapes is the absence of humans. His scenes are also stripped of buildings and other human-made structures as if the entire history of humankind had been erased, and all that remains is pure landscape, an unadulterated emotional state. In the end, the only training trace of human existence is found in the paint itself.
Peter Frie is one of Sweden’s leading contemporary artists. He has exhibited widely throughout Europe and held solo and group exhibitions in the United States and Asia. His work is represented in collections including Stockholm’s Moderna Museet and the Museum of Contemporary Art Kiasma, as well as numerous European and American private collections. Frie won the Ars Fennica Award in 1998.
A catalog providing a comprehensive overview of Frie’s oeuvre will be published in February 2023. The catalog will be available for purchase at the exhibition.