Pia Fries

On the occasion of its 20th anniversary in 2017, the Museum Kurhaus Kleve is presenting an exhibition that takes up passages from his career to date and brings together the past and the present. In an accentuated exhibition, it combines an important focus of its collection with a highly renowned companion. More than 400 years separate the artistic oeuvre of Hendrick Goltzius and the contemporary painter Pia Fries. Both are united by a desire for metamorphosis, which is why Pia Fries adds herself as "Polymorphia" to the subtitle of Goltzius' exhibition and catalogue book, to which the artist biographer Karel van Mander has bestowed the honorary title "Proteus" - and thus, with a wink, allows associations with a fictitious, seemingly antique artist couple.

2017 marks the 400th anniversary of the death of Hendrick Goltzius (1558-1617), one of the most famous engravers, draughtsmen and painters of his time in Haarlem. The magnificent collection of around 200 copper engravings in the Angerhausen Collection of the Kurhaus Kleve Museum forms the basis for the first comprehensive print retrospective on the Lower Rhine in 35 years, which presents him in a meaningful context with loans from Germany and the Netherlands.

In 1997, the Swiss painter Pia Fries (*1955) was the first artist to receive a solo exhibition at the Museum Kurhaus Kleve. Since then, she has developed into one of the great painters of our time, who will be the first female artist to receive the "Gerhard Altenbourg Prize" in November 2017. Now she returns to put her latest painting, which has been intensively concerned with Hendrick Goltzius since 2010, into a synthesis with the highly complex pictorial creations of the old master.