Peter Frie


Peter Frie
Landscape 2
2023
Oil on canvas
180 x 120 cm
71 x 47 ¼ in.

Frie has recently been spending more and more time away from his native Sweden on Phuket. His sojourn in Thailand allies him with artists of the past who also went to foreign countries. Unlike Gauguin or Matisse, however, Frie is not looking for exotic subject matter; no palm trees or monkeys appear in his latest work and instead he continues to paint what he has always painted. However, he has admitted a change to his palette and a new deep red has begun to appear in his work, the kind of vivid colour we experience "more clearly and more intensely closer to the Equator, in the brief moments before the golden orb of the sun dips below the horizon." Another new departure is sculpture and Frie has begun to make dark-patinated bronzes, which are three-dimensional versions of the kinds of trees which appear in his paintings. These are "recognisably a painter's sculptures, given they are shaped as much by light and shade as by the hand... they create their own surrounding world and scale. When we look at them, we can see the air vibrating around them." (Timo Valjakka, Under the Red Sky, 2016)

Frie lives and works in Båstad and on Phuket. Examples of his work are in a number of major public collections including the Moderna Museet, Stockholm; Kiasma Museum of Modern Art, Helsinki; and the Malmö Museum, Malmö, as well as private collections across Europe. Frie has exhibited in solo and group exhibitions across Europe and the USA, most recently at the VIDA Museum & Konsthall, Borgholm, Sweden and last showed at the New Art Centre in 2016. In 1998 he was awarded the Ars Fennica, the prestigious prize awarded by the Henna and Pertti Niemistö Art Foundation.

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Peter Frie
Big Yamutree
2016
Bronze and stainless steel
340 x 245 x 152cm
11ft 2 x 8ft x 4ft 12 in.

Peter Frie
The Hill
2026
Oil on canvas
120 x 80 cm
47 ¼ x 31 ½ in.

The Hill is a faithful emblem of Frie's perception of nature, void of figures and buildings, its subjects comprise a low horizon, unidentifiable foliage, and a great expanse of sky, with clouds that appear to have retained the luminescent quality of wet paint. What with the lack of identifiable landmarks and the paintings' abstract quality, the work of Peter Frie occupies a liminal space; his practice of painting entirely from memory lends itself to this effect. He takes no preliminary sketches or photographs, and instead paints the landscape as it appears in his mind. Although the specific locations of landscapes are often ambiguous, we know that The Hill is reminiscent of an early childhood memory of Stora Alvaret on the island of Öland, where Frie picked mushrooms with his Mother.

The composition does not fill the broad frame of the canvas, but rather appears within it, encroached by blankness. This blank space is representative of how memory is fickle, and frame the image as a fragment; with each painting we are made aware that truth is subjective, and each individual perception holds value.

Whilst the images presented are landscapes recollected by the artist, Peter Frie's work offers a space of quiet contemplation in the mind of the viewer. The dreamscapes pull at the tendrils of our own memories, creating a feeling that we have already bared witness to these anonymous views.

Peter Frie
Visiting No 1
2002
Oil on canvas
193 x 397 x 4.5 cm
6ft 4 x 13ft ¼ x 1 ¾ in.
Signed and dated on reverse