How can painting be about its own creative process? How is it able to make the conceptual performance of painting visible through the means of its own creation? Since the mid-1970s, Bernard Frize has been exploring just that in his playfully rational works, which combine intellectualism with a sensuous experience.

Frize‘s exhibition Logische Schlussfolgerung (Logical Conclusion) at the Gallery features a recent series of works that reflect the artist’s ongoing exploration of issues inherent to painting. The large canvases are entirely covered with vertical and horizontal, sometimes interwoven lines of color that create a clear and rigid structure. He paints orthogonal grids, crosshatchings, and lines, using a broad brush to lay out the sections of color. These seemingly mechanical paintings are void of any brushwork that might hint at a personal style. Instead, Frize concentrates on the act of painting and its conditions

The brilliant diversity found in the artist’s works is indebted to a rich vocabulary of forms. Frize’s series are experiments with a wide variety of shapes and patterns that remind us of minimalist art and Color Field painting, perhaps even Albrecht Dürer’s Great Piece of Turf. Sometimes he uses amorphous forms that create marbled structures all over the surface, while other times geometric elements intersect at right angles. Once in a while, he will use brushstrokes to create blended schemes of color. These visually startling clusters of patterns and brushstrokes composed on the expansive canvases are instruments in the orchestra of forms in Frize’s experiments with painterly structures and abstract gestures.