Biography

Bernard Frize’s abstract painting is decisively process-oriented. Working in series, he explores all the possible visual outcomes of precise protocols, which he conceives beforehand. These preestablished conditions and constraints usually pertain to the use of conventional tools and materials, the almost mechanical execution of seemingly simple gestures, and, at times, the simultaneous assistance of other painters. While each series records the peculiar dynamics of a predetermined technique, his vibrant abstractions also serve as arenas for chance to operate. By outsourcing some of his creative power to contingency (starting with his highly distinctive yet random color palette), he allows for painterly events or disruptions to unfold on his canvases. At once calculated and random, conceptual and organic, his aesthetics portends an automatic ideal of painting. Frize humorously describes his most successful works as those that required minimal intervention on his part, and thus realized themselves to some extent autonomously.