In 1998 Peter Frie received the Nordic countries' most prestigious art prize, the Ars Fennica Award from the Henna and Pertti Niemistö Art Foundation in recognition of his high standards of creative work and originality in the visual arts.

Frie is well-known among European contemporary painters for his devotion to the landscape. He is directly inspired by the lush agricultural planes of Scandinavia. After spending much of his youth painting in Spain and Italy, Frie now lives in Båstad, Sweden. From this small idyllic town on the western coast of Sweden, Frie journeys throughout the province of Skåne to paint. He has also worked in Friesland, the northern province of the Netherlands and in Telemark, Norway.

In the manner of the nineteenth century British artists J.M.W Turner and John Constable, Frie creates contemporary landscapes that are unashamedly beautiful and intensely arresting. In the tradition of German artist Caspar David Friedrich, Frie's landscapes are simultaneously intimate and expressive. His work also shares an affinity with other Northern Romantic artists such as the Norwegian painter Johan Christian Claussen Dahl (1788-1857) who sought to convey human emotion through his landscapes.

Frie's landscapes are devoid of human subjects and built environments. These are paintings about the art of painting. Though created largely from memory, the artist begins by painting rough sketches in order to capture the light and mood of a particular scene. He then completes the work in his studio. Frie's virtuosity as a painter is evident in his depiction of sky and clouds. In the tradition of the Dutch landscape painters of the seventeenth century, Frie adopts a low horizon line in order to capture the effects of light on the ground and in cloud formations.

In each of the five different compositional schemes shown, the artist combines landscape with areas of white. The size and shape of these areas have been carefully balanced with the mass of the landscape. The broad white spaces serve as formal elements and are a means of suggesting the powerful and expansive character of nature. Whether horizontal or vertical, each landscape is dominated by an atmospheric sky of deep and intense colors. Also included in the exhibition are smaller scale works painted on blocks of wood and individual sketchbook sheets placed in antique frames collected by the artist.

Since 1988 Frie's paintings have been exhibited in solo and group exhibitions throughout Scandinavia. His work is included in the collection of the Moderna Museet, Stockholm, the Museum of Contemporary Art, Helsinki, and the Friesichen Museum, Leeuwarden, Holland as well as private collections in Europe and the United States.