Katrin Fridriks

For more than a decade, Katrin Fridriks has been experimenting with the constitutive elements of painting, that is the quality of the paint, its support, as well as a range of unconventional painting techniques, to attain her distinct and outstanding style. It is the unique interplay between the medium, the timing and the artists’ body moving around a canvas on the floor that encompasses the fluid and organic quality of her paintings. These are best described as an occurrence, rather than a static image: The moment of eruption, liquid matter gushing from deep inside, small particles hurtling through the air, dripping all over the surface, all solid is liquefied and each layer set in motion. This depiction of her abstract painting furthermore alludes to natural occurrences, such as the scene of the outburst of a geyser in her home country, Iceland. The unique and pristine landscape of the geologically active island has been an enormous influence on her work and life. By means of her distinct painting technique, Fridriks captures the force and the sublime of its nature, without depicting an event or the scenery, as such. Although applied on a canvas, the paint only seems to have come to a temporary halt, before continuing to swirl and splash over the edges of the canvas – and into the space of the beholder. Rather than capturing a moment in time, her technique evokes a feeling of movement and energy that, on an abstract level, directly relates to the origin of the evolution of the universe.

Katrin Fridriks (*1974 in Reykjavik) lives and works in France.