Katrin Fridriks born in 1974 – Reykjavik (Iceland) is an abstract painter. Her personality & inexhaustible inner energy accurately question our technology-based contemporary time. With her own touch of irony and information at play, she explores forces that mould our society and raises controversial and political themes.
Her artistic process looks for stimulating people memory and consciousness. Her Icelandic roots have aroused this curiosity, primarily for the four elements -air, fire, earth & water- powerfully displayed by volcanoes, geysers & glaciers, and have shaped her way to comprehend nature & life. „Energy flow“ in situ installation captures and translates part of this extreme & intense landscape.
Playing with colors and their own reflects, she is casting a new light on our society and its dynamics. With her well-defined colorimetry using “silver, gold, cooper, aluminum” as backgrounds/shadows, drawing from platforms of planet earth, Fridriks is taking us deeper. The enlargement in size and shape of her drippings, in the vein of pioneer Jackson Pollock however with an enhanced precision & technique, heightens the movement of her kinetic abstract paintings, giving a stronger rhythm and denseness. Katrin reviews things from scratch, she does not let us labor under illusions, but she is drawing the idea for awareness of not underestimating “mother nature”, like her recent color-saturated paintings, “Peace of cake”.
In black & white dominance, artworks are explosive, roaring and unpredictable as in a perpetual motion. The genetic classification of society is explored by black “Gene&Ethics” & white “Stendhal syndrome” paintings, a reversed animal skull as sculpture defining today’s illegal cloning research and the threedimensional space „Code DNAnd munitions“ combining painting & architecture. Passion intensely revived by the brilliant and prolific American architect John Portman, and partly inspired by Anish Kapoor’s monumental works.
Another influent figure has impacted her experimental approach: Pierre Restany, acclaimed art critic who coined the term “Nouveau Réalisme” and curated many exhibitions such as (one of his latest) “Political Ecology” in New York – 2001, developing his thought on nature and chaos.
Restany to Fridriks (april 2003): “[…] I realize you have the idea of introducing and involving politics in a story through paintings. […] Seeing the way you organize your paintings in sequences or in verses like a discourse, you are at the limit between writing and graphics, painter gesture and semantics; this is the limit where you start to read a painting! You have, as those people who work language by both verb and gesture, the ability of extracting large syntheses, with a strong power of impacts on the reader. […] This is a work on the rhythm, the impulse of writing. Filtered through your own reflection, this has become an autonomous language. Those who can, even today, survive, and basically represent the conscience and active nostalgia of this view, existing in your paintings, are those who truly become great visionaries”. Pierre Restany (1930-2003)
The essence of this unique visual language/writing, highlighted by Restany, radiates from a self-taught urban iconoclast. Emphasized by a tireless work on matter & technique, her clever & unseen abstract expressionism combined with subtle Japanese calligraphic details embodies all the cultural wealth & open-mindedness from years spent in several countries. Fridriks pictorial substance envelops space, shape and time. Creating new perspectives, her work brings an innovative dimension to abstraction.