Award winner 1998
Peter Frie
The Henna and Pertti Niemistö Art Foundation's annual art award, the ARS FENNICA prize, was awarded in March 1998 to the painter Peter Frie (b. 1947). Frie, who lives in Southern Sweden, was chosen from a list of nine Nordic artists. The selection was made by the Director of Collections at London's Tate Gallery, Jeremy Lewison. He has also written an essay for the catalogue published to accompany the exhibition.
The exhibition tour, which opened at Pori Art Museum on October 11, is the first broad survey of Peter Frie's work to be shown in Finland or elsewhere. In his prize exhibition, Peter Frie is showing some completely new works, including landscapes painted in Finland last summer. Of his earlier works, we can see a selection of Norwegian landscapes from 1997 and some landscapes painted in Holland in 1995.
Peter Frie's paintings are rooted in the long tradition of landscape painting, and especially in the way of depicting the landscape as a powerfully charged mood. The paintings manifest a powerful sense of place, but they are also have a metaphorical dimension, so that any overly explicit link with a certain place tends to become blurred. Frie does not reproduce views, but paints memories. "I do not paint landscapes in themselves, but project my own states of mind onto them: I depict a landscape that I would like to inhabit at the time the work is created," Frie says.
Peter Frie frequently arranges his painted theme so that it is part of a white painted ground, leaving this 'empty' space to act as a balancing factor that emphasises the landscape theme. "The large white areas flanking the depicted image permit a sense of expansion, like a screen behind which a continuation of the landscape will be revealed. They also have the capacity to concentrate the image, to intensify the spectator's scrutiny and his emotional response", is how Jeremy Lewison describes them in his essay.
Exhibitions
Porin taidemuseo
Hämeenlinnan taidemuseo
Jyväskylän taidemuseo