Bernard Frize

Bernard Frize was born in 1949 in Saint-Mandé, France, and trained at the École Supérieure d'Art in Aix-en-Provence and the École des Beaux-Arts in Montpellier. From 1984 to 1986 he held a residency at the Villa Médicis in Rome as a pensionnaire of the Académie de France à Rome — a distinction awarded by the French state — an experience that marked a formative chapter in his development. He continues to live and work between Paris and Berlin.

Frize has built a practice centered on procedural abstraction, in which self-imposed rules governing the application of paint — its sequence, its pooling, its overlap — become the generative logic of each work. The tension between systematic constraint and the unpredictable behavior of materials has drawn sustained critical attention. Writing in 2022, Beaux Arts Magazine examined his balance of spontaneity and protocol in the exhibition Comment puis-je te dire… at Galerie Perrotin Matignon in Paris, while The Brooklyn Rail situated his show at Perrotin's Orchard Street space within the longer arc of his practice. A 2026 feature in Cultured Magazine focused on Les 26 at Perrotin Paris, a body of grid-based paintings that pressed further against the boundaries of his own methods. A major retrospective, Sans repentir (Without Remorse), held at the Centre Pompidou in 2019, traced his work from early conceptual abstractions dating to 1977 through later engagements with figurative elements and photography; the institution described him as an important French painter on the international artistic scene. An earlier retrospective, Aplat, was presented at the Musée d'Art moderne de la Ville de Paris in 2003.

Recent solo exhibitions include Les dernières peintures at Perrotin Seoul in 2022, Things I've Seen at Perrotin Paris in 2023, Bernard Frize: Shadows, Spirits and Clouds at Marian Goodman Gallery in Los Angeles and Bernard Frize: Blackout in the Grid at Simon Lee Gallery in London, both in 2024, and A Labor of Love at Galerie nächst St. Stephan Rosemarie Schwarzwälder in Vienna in 2025. His work is held in the permanent collections of the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris, the Kunstmuseum Basel, the Museo Reina Sofía in Madrid, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, the National Museum of Art in Osaka, and the Fondation Louis Vuitton in Paris. He is represented by Galerie Emmanuel Perrotin, Marian Goodman Gallery, and Galerie nächst St. Stephan Rosemarie Schwarzwälder, among others.