Christine Frerichs: Recent Paintings

Billis/Williams Gallery is pleased to present Christine Frerichs: Recent Paintings - the gallery’s first solo exhibition of paintings by the Los Angeles-based artist. The exhibition opens with a reception on November 15th and continues through December 20th.

Christine Frerichs creates intimate observational paintings of interior scenes in her home and studio. Each painting in the series is created over days, weeks, or even months - her easel remains in place as daily life ebbs and flows around it. The compositions evolve as the space changes over time: glasses are placed on a bedside table, the sheets get rumpled by her partner’s nap, a plant sprouts and wilts, papers stack up on a counter. The paintings are a form of self-portraiture - a portrait not as she sees herself but as if we are looking through her eyes at her sense of self reflected in the surroundings.

Time is an ever present component of the paintings - be it the changing light over day or weeks, or the accumulation of objects on a table, or that we step backwards and forward in a hallway with the artist. Frerichs came out as gay at age 40 and the necessity and importance of change is a thread that weaves through the work. These are process paintings - they are about the time spent in contemplation and the search for meaning in the intimacies of daily life: potting plants, a bedroom corner, the hallway depicted as many times as it is walked through in a day.

Our lives are built and lived in our personal spaces and, like our lives and our selves, they change bit by bit over time. The spider plant in the corner takes on a persona - it flourishes and wilts and flourishes again in an unexplained trajectory - are we watching the plant grow? Or are we watching it languish? Frerichs doesn’t present the viewer with a chronology to the series - she presents moments and the viewer’s own personal experience creates a narrative.

Frerichs’ paintings are exquisitely rendered in oil on wax coated paper, linen and canvas. The wax ground, applied hot, gives the paintings a muted luminosity that is like no other. The oil over wax has a flow and movement that is subtle and distinctive - detailed but not and imperfectly perfect. Her color palette is soft - as if time as rubbed off the sharpness and left a comfortable calm. Even the edge of the paintings, where Frerichs intentionally allows the build up of layers to be visible, speak to a cumulus of histories.

Our personal spaces are a reflection of ourselves - a physical manifestation of our routines and patterns. Our lives repeat day after day with subtle shifts. Sometimes those shifts are imperceptible until we find ourselves later looking back and realizing how far we’ve come. Frerichs is asking us to look, to see, to pause, and to understand that change comes slowly but that the wonder and beauty of life is in the never-ending evolution of the self.

Christine Frerichs (b. 1979 in Los Angeles, CA) received her BFA from the University of Arizona (Tucson) in 2002 and her MFA from University of California (Riverside) in 2009. Her work has been exhibited throughout the United States including in Los Angeles, New York, and Tucson. She has been the recipient of the Painting’s Edge Residency and Fellowship, a Change Inc. Artist Grant, and the Maxwell H. Gluck Fellowship. Her work as been published in Artforum, art ltd., ARTPULSE, the Los Angeles Times, Two Coast of Paint, and New American Paintings, among others. She is currently an Associate Professor of Art at East Los Angeles College. Frerichs lives and works in Los Angeles.