Friart has organised over 160 exhibitions and 30 off-site projects since it was founded in 1981. In 1991, Friart moved into an industrial building at No. 22 Petites-Rames in Fribourg’s old town. At the crossroads of Switzerland’s different linguistic regions, Friart is somewhere that brings the different art scenes of French and German-speaking Switzerland into dialogue. Friart has earned an international reputation for its adventurousness and the global reach of a curatorial programme that showcases emerging, Swiss and international artists, and presents historical surveys that aim to promote the (re-)discovery of parallel histories, alternative cultures and expression, and artists and works that have not received the attention they deserve.
The Kunsthalle Friart has presented debut solo exhibitions of Dominique Gonzales Foerster (1996), Latifa Echakhch (2010), Valentin Carron (2002), Steven Parrino (2002) and David Hammons (1993), and organised significant exhibitions of work by Renée Green (1996), Julia Scher (1996), Thomas Hirschhorn (1995) and Marc Dion (1995). Recently, it hosted exhibitions by the designers Trix & Robert Haussmann (2014), Cameron Rowland (2016), Italian artist Ketty La Rocca (2019), Dorota Gaweda & Eglé Kulbokaité (2019), Calla Henkel & Max Pitegoff (2020) and Hamishi Farah (2021) and organised the investigative and research exhibitions Movie Implosion! (2015), on Swiss experimental cinema, Discoteca Analitica (2019), on the emergence of multimedia environments in the 1960s, and The films of Guillaume Dustan (2020), which presented the films made by the French writer between 2000 and 2004.
Kunsthalle Friart Fribourg is managed by a non-profit association.
MEMBERS OF THE COMMITTEE OF THE FRI-ART ASSOCIATION
– Clémence de Weck: Presidency
– Nicolas Brodard
– Hani Buri
– Irène Unholz
– Elise Meyer
– Philippe Wicht
– Simon Zurich
ARTISTIC DIRECTION SINCE 1981
– Michel Ritter (1981-2002)
– Sarah Zürcher (2002-2007)
– Corinne Charpentier (2007-2013)
– Balthazar Lovay (2013-2019)
– Nicolas Brulhart (since 2019)