Pia Fries is a Swiss painter and part of a new generation of artists grappling with the possibility of abstract painting in the twenty-first century. Born in 1955 in Switzerland, Fries originally studied sculpture at the Lucerne University of Applied Science and Arts and moved on to study painting at the Kunstakademie Dusseldorf under Gerhard Richter. Since then, Fries has exhibited extensively in Europe and the United States and had her first solo show in London with Bernard Jacobson Gallery in 2007. She had a retrospective at the Kunstmuseum Winterthur in the same year. Although complex in their imagery and with obvious reference to American Abstract Expressionists, her paintings have a particularly contemporary European freshness to them. Her work appears in major public collections including the Kunstmuseum Winterthur; the Kunsthaus Zurich; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; the Staatsgalerie Stuttgart; the Museum Folkwang in Essen; and the Albright-Knox Gallery in Buffalo, New York.