Katrin Fridriks opens New Wave at Circle Culture, Hamburg

Katrin Fridriks has had the kind of year most painters would take gladly. She has been in Venice as part of Personal Structures: Crossing Borders, which the Global Art Affairs Foundation staged in the rooms of Palazzo Bembo during the 56th Biennale. Lazarides in London published a new screenprint of hers, Royal Gene & Ethics, an eight-colour print on a big square sheet in an edition of 70. A first monograph is in the works. On 6 November she opens a solo show, New Wave, at Circle Culture Gallery in Hamburg, and it runs until 26 February.

The UK street-art quarterly Very Nearly Almost had featured her in its issue 26. The print is worth a word first, because it shows how far her interests reach beyond paint. Royal Gene & Ethics is based on a painting of the same name and takes genetics as its subject, and in particular the question of what manipulating genes might mean for the future. Eight colours were printed, with a gloss varnish overprint and embossing, which is a lot of work for a screenprint and suits an artist whose surfaces are always doing several things at once. She also showed at the Reykjavík Art Museum this year, a homecoming of sorts.

Who she is

Fridriks was born in Reykjavík in 1974 and works from Luxembourg, a long way from the volcanoes, geysers and glaciers that feed so much of her painting. She is an abstract painter, but not a gestural one in the usual sense. The work is about forces: speed, mass, gravity, growth, the way energy moves through a system and where it ends up. Her canvases tend to look as if something has just happened to them, a splash or a burst caught at the moment of impact, and then they reward a closer look with passages of extraordinary control.

That control has a source. Years ago she studied Japanese calligraphy, where a character is made in a single committed stroke and there is no going back to correct it. The discipline stayed with her. What she has been chasing since is a way of getting that same decisive energy onto canvas at a much larger scale, with paint that behaves more like a physical force than a brushmark.

Her relationship with Circle Culture goes back several years, through Leak of Information at the Berlin space in 2011, a presentation at Art13 in London in 2013 and Stendhal Syndrome, again in Berlin, in 2014. Lazarides gave her Flying Awareness in London the same year. Beyond the galleries she has made large site-specific pieces, including an installation at the nautical stadium in Nîmes, and she showed at the Liverpool Biennial in 2008. Her own site keeps a list of her solo exhibitions, which shows how steadily the gallery shows have built up since 2010.

New Wave

The Hamburg show continues her research into how mass, speed and the distribution of energy can be recorded in paint, and this time the subject is gravity. The works are square, and many of them are made with a technique she has been developing recently: the paint is fired at the canvas at a set speed and frequency, instead of being poured or thrown by hand. The shapes that result sit on canvases primed in silver, and the bright primary colours against that metallic ground give an odd optical effect. The paint appears to float slightly above the surface, as if it had not quite landed.

Titles such as Mass Sensation, Speed of Light and New Wave Gravity tell you where her head is. So does the look of the work, which is calmer and more fluid than some of her earlier, more explosive canvases. Where those felt like the instant of a collision, these feel like something slowly changing shape, closer to the drift of wax in a lava lamp than to a splash. Stand in front of one for a while and the forms seem to be still moving, reorganising themselves as your eye travels across them.

The link back to calligraphy is direct. The aim, as she has described it, is to put the creative force down on canvas in one go, the same way she once learnt to make a character in a single stroke. The new technique lets her do that with a precision the hand alone could not manage, while keeping the sense that each mark is a single event.