We are delighted to be opening the third solo exhibition of Leipzig-based painter Franziska Holstein (*1978) at the gallery as part of Gallery Weekend Berlin. Following her extensive solo exhibition at the Von der Heydt-Museum Wuppertal last year, the artist has been working on a complex of new canvases, wall paintings and wall works made of wood, which she will be exhibiting in her exhibition "New Works" at Galerie Friese from 27 April.

Franziska Holstein's work is the result of a practical and intellectual exploration of colour and form. Over the years, she has consistently developed her own canon of colours and colour combinations, forms and working methods, which she uses playfully.
The processual nature of her working method - the systematic and intuitive testing of colour tones and compositional possibilities of her own formal vocabulary - remains recognisable in her works: through thick layers of paint that reveal underlying colours on the sides of the canvases or through shadowy outlines of previous compositions. Her works interact intensively with each other - either by existing as part of larger groups of works or through open compositional, formal or colour references to each other. It is precisely these relationships that are brought into focus in the exhibition. For a publication published by Lubok Verlag in Leipzig at the same time as the exhibition, the artist separated forms from her acrylic paintings and combined them into new compositions. Forms from previous wall paintings - also as "negative forms" - become cut-outs in large wall works made of wood, an act of "archiving the individual forms" (Franziska Holstein).
We are thus dealing with an ever-expanding process of pictorial invention, in which Franziska Holstein integrates new materials and new pictorial forms into her pictorial world as carefully as persistently.