○ Title : Now or Never
○ Date : May 18 –August 14, 2019
○ Venue : 76 RUE DE TURENNE 75003 PARIS FRANCE
○ Gallery hours: Tuesday – Saturday, 11am – 7pm

Perrotin Paris is proud to present a new exhibition of French painter Bernard Frize, simultaneously to his personal exhibition “Bernard Frize. Without Remorse” at the Centre Pompidou – Musée National d’Art Moderne (May 29 - August 26, curated by Angela Lampe). Featuring a wide range of paintings, including new productions, this exhibitions mark 25 years of collaboration between the artist and the gallery. The artist, who recently exhibited in Japan (Perrotin Tokyo and Kaikai Kiki gallery), will also be exhibited this Fall at Perrotin New York.

While regularly revisiting various moments of his past practice, Frize has never stopped exploring new concepts, inventing novel ways to paint (starting with the development, 10 years ago, of processes based on the creation of one painting by multiple people simultaneously), but he has also, since the mid-1990s, abandoned all recourse to what we summarize as “figurative art,” namely the representation of real and identifiable objects or images. It is only by accident or allusion, and by a natural predisposition of our vision, that we perceive this or that painting as evoking a stone, a curtain or a bookshelf. So much so that this action of expansion that first strikes us corresponds to another, of reduction or of disconnection. The paradox is far-reaching and leads immediately to the Frize’s conception of painting since the beginning, which is to constitute it of an ensemble of paradoxes, in other words of propositions contrary to common sense and expectation.

In 2015, Bernard Frize was awarded the Käthe Kollwitz Prize by the Berlin Akademie der Künste. The Jury members, Ayşe Erkmen, Mona Hatoum and Karin Sander wrote in their statement: “He strives with the utmost sophistication toward the advancement of contemporary painterly abstraction and the development of a topology of painterly gestures and structures. ”Bernard Frize was also awarded the Fred Thieler Prize for Painting, Berlinische Galerie, Berlin, 2011.

His work is represented in more than 45 public collections around the world, including the Tate Gallery, London; MNAM/ Centre Pompidou, Paris; MUMOK, Vienna; NMAO the National Museum of Art Osaka; Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Museum für Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt; the Kunstmuseum, Basel and the Kunsthalle, Zurich.