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Roche Court
, SP5 1BG, Salisbury, United Kingdom
Open: Daily 11am-4pm with advance booking

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Artist: Peter Frie

The New Art Centre presents an exhibition of new works by Swedish artist, Peter Frie. Installed in the gallery at Roche Court Sculpture Park, a collection of eleven paintings and six bronze sculptures inspired by Salisbury Plain. Landscape and a sense of space have always been at the forefront of Frie’s vision.

Peter Frie’s paintings are rooted in the long tradition of landscape painting, and especially in the way of depicting landscape as a powerfully charged mood. Frie does not reproduce views but paints memories.

The Swedish artist does not make any preliminary sketches on site, but instead paints in his studio in Båstad. Fundamentally, Frie works from memory and his paintings also prompt viewers to revisit their own memories and experiences of landsapes.

The use of white fields, so characteristic of Peter Frie’s paintings, distort and distance the viewer from the subjects. He has been including these white spaces in his work in a variety of ways since the early 90s, and they return here in partly new expressions.

The mood is one of peaceful contemplation. Using broad brushstrokes, sometimes a palette knife or narrow strokes, a speck of complementary colour, and characteristically unbridled brushwork, Frie brings to life an illusion of volume within the two-dimensional surface. The works are captivating and contemporary.

In this new exhibition, Roche Court viewers will see Frie’s three-dimensional works in bronze, an aspect of his practice that began in 2009. They are sculptures with painterly characteristics, and their dark quality gives the effect of silhouetted trees on an evening landscape.

The opening of this latest exhibition coincides with marking a 40-year relationship between the New Art Centre and Peter Frie, having first met in Basel in June 1983.

Born in 1947, Peter Frie now lives and works in Båstad, Sweden and Thailand.
His sculptures and paintings are shown across Europe and is currently showing his work at the National Museum of Stockholm.
Frie is a friend of the New Art Centre, having first exhibited here in 1984 in a solo exhibition titled Paintings, when the gallery was located on Sloane Street in London. We now celebrate a 40-year long successful relationship with him, as he has exhibited at the New Art Centre regularly throughout the years. He last exhibited at Roche Court in 2017 with his solo exhibition: Peter Frie: Path.
His work is held in collections that include Moderna Museet in Stockholm, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Helsinki, the Malmö Art Museum, the Kalmar Art Museum, and the Saltarvet Collection in Fiskebäckskil, Sweden.
Major featured exhibitions at: the Galleri Lars Bohman, Stockholm (1990); Galleri Atle Gerhardsen, Oslo (1997); Metropolitan Art Museum, Pusan (1999); Roman Zenner Gallery, Stuttgart (2001); Ikon Gallery, Birmingham (2001); New Art Centre Basel Art Fair, Switzerland (2002); Galleri Lars Bohman (2011); Thielska Galleriet, Stockholm (2012); Galleri Forsblom, Helsinki (2013); Serlachius Museum, Mantra, Finland (2017); Galleri Arnstedt (2022).