Peter Frie: Sometimes the Sky is Blue

Peter Frie’s landscapes emerge from memory and sensation. Among the images etched most deeply in his mind are childhood days spent mushrooming with his mother. Roaming beneath tall trees, across sunlit meadows, and along narrow paths, time seemed to stand still. Through these early experiences, the artist came to understand the immense power and significance of nature. Over the course of his long career, he has painted countless desolate landscapes in which trees serve as the sole point of orientation.

Frie’s work draws on the historic legacy of landscape painting, particularly the tradition of treating landscape as an intensely charged emotional state. His paintings shift attention away from rational description toward subjective experience: nature becomes a vehicle for the expression of deep feeling. His work evokes a longing for something ineffable, inviting viewers into dreamlike vistas where misty horizons, low-hanging clouds, and fleeting glimmers of sunlight create a tension between intense illumination and muted tonal transitions.

The exhibition presents Frie’s paintings alongside his landscape-inspired bronze sculptures – as if the trees in his canvases had stepped into three dimensions. Some works depict thin-trunked individual trees with lush crowns, while others form small clusters or groves. In certain sculptures, Frie snaps branches or cuts through the base, allowing the tree to fall. Rather than faithfully reproducing natural appearances, these works evoke the quality of tree-ness, just as the affective atmosphere of his paintings takes precedence over the convincing depiction of observed reality.

Peter Frie (b. 1947) is one of Sweden’s leading contemporary artists. He has exhibited widely across Europe and has participated in solo and group exhibitions in the United States and Asia. His work is held in collections including Moderna Museet, Stockholm, and the Museum of Contemporary Art Kiasma, as well as in numerous private collections in Europe and the United States. Frie was the recipient of the Ars Fennica Award in 1998.