Bernard Frize was born in 1949 in Saint-Mandé, east of Paris. Exactly when he attended the École des Beaux-Arts in Montpellier is unknown. His first solo exhibition was presented in 1979 in Paris’s Galerie Lucien Durand. In 1986 his conceptual, abstract painting was shown in the Villa Medici in Rome, which is affiliated with Paris’s Académie des Beaux-Arts. Since the mid-1980s Frize has been included in European exhibitions and with increasing frequency in international ones. Important public and private collections have purchased his works, among them the Centre national d’art et de culture Georges-Pompidou in Paris and the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía in Madrid. In Germany his works can be seen in the Kunstmuseum Bonn, the Städel Museum and elsewhere. Frize was awarded the Berlinische Galerie’s Fred Thieler Prize for Painting in 2011, and the Käthe Kollwitz Prize from Berlin’s Academy of Arts in 2015. Frize lives in Berlin and Paris.
