Show Preview | Guido Frick

Amarillo, TX
Sunset Art Gallery, October 7-31

Guido Frick, Mountain and Red Shed, oil, 16 x 20.

Guido Frick, Mountain and Red Shed, oil, 16 x 20.

This story was featured in the October 2016 issue of Southwest Art magazine. Get the Southwest Art  October 2016 print issue or digital download now–then subscribe to Southwest Art and never miss another story.

Nature’s beauty and bounty inspires Guido Frick, who returns to the United States for an immense solo show at Sunset Art Gallery this month. A preview of the show is offered from 5 to 7 p.m. on Thursday, October 6, and the show opens on October 7, coinciding with Amarillo’s First Friday events.

Frick spends half of the year in his native Germany and other locales in Europe. The rest of the year, he travels from California to Florida, teaching workshops and painting. In the past eight years he’s traveled some 350,000 miles in the United States, and he jokes that, if he weren’t a painter, he could easily be a tour guide. “I consider many states as my hunting grounds, since painters are hunters—hunters for subjects and locations. Inspiration, fascination, curiosity. These are the driving energies to paint a scene or to catch a mood,” he says. He’s often drawn to Wyoming, Montana, Nebraska, and Texas, though each state has a special fascination for him. He says he understands the magnetic appeal of western landscapes. “I very well understand old timers like pioneers, frontiersmen, trappers, and mountain men. With a ‘Westward, ho!’ on the lips, they were driven by curiosity to find out what’s beyond the next horizon.”

The paintings in this show reflect Frick’s extended travels throughout the United States and Europe. He’s offering a greater number of works—nearly 50—and greater variety than in his previous shows at the gallery, where he’s been represented for nearly a decade. “Having had smaller shows in the past, it’s just time for a more comprehensive exhibition and to give the American people an idea how a European painter sees their country,” he says.

Frick studied with Sergei Bongart in the early 1980s and still considers the Russian master one of his greatest influences. Frick’s bold, expressive brushwork captures landscapes—from forests to beach scenes to canyon lands—as well as still lifes. The show includes works from each subject area.

“Guido has a great feel for the landscape and how to interpret what he sees,” says gallery owner Ann Crouch. “He does an enormous amount of plein-air painting all over the world. If I pick up one of his landscapes from this region, I know immediately where it is. It’s realism bordering on impressionism. It has a personal touch to it that makes you want to visit the location where he painted.”

For his part, Frick brushes aside labels of impressionism and expressionism and embraces the wholly American philosophy of independence. “I am always crossing the borderline between impressionism and expressionism. In art, there should be no border[s], no fences, no stop sign. I want to paint free and generous … always outdoors, in nature, not in a claustrophobic and restricting
studio,” he says in his biography.

“Do I have a change from previous work? I don’t know,” Frick says. “I just want to paint. I want to stay what I am: an emotional, realistic painter.” —Ashley M. Biggers

contact information
806.353.5700
www.sunsetartgalleryofamarillo.com

This story was featured in the October 2016 issue of Southwest Art magazine. Get the Southwest Art  October 2016 print issue or digital download now–then subscribe to Southwest Art and never miss another story.

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