Mark Fry was born in 1952. He studied under Prima Conti at the Accademia delle Belle Arti in Florence in the 1970s. Since 1990 he has painted in his studio near Dieppe in Normandy. A solo exhibition of his paintings was held at The Charleston Gallery near Lewes in Sussex in 1996. His work is represented in private collections in the US and the UK. He has had three one-man shows at Christopher Hull Gallery and exhibited at Archeus Fine Art in March 2001.

The catalogue introduction by Stanley Stewart reads;

In his studio on the edge of the Pays de Caux in Normandy, Mark Fry has been distilling ideas that inhabit some exhilarating territory between figurative and abstract painting.

In this new body of work, Fry has produced contemplative, almost musical compositions in which shape and colour, movement and space are unleashed to dramatic effect. But the notes which float across their surfaces are often from a recognizable natural world - a wave unrolling on a shore, a moon rising in a window, light seeping through a blind - pared down to elemental form.

Fry's paintings have the quality of journeys. They arrive bearing the imprint of landscapes, from a shore to a night sky, from Mali to the Solomon Islands. Their stillness emerges from that unsettling moment when the journey stops and reflection begins. The forms look as if they have always existed, as if they have been excavated rather than painted. They could be cave markings. They might be symbols from ancient lands. Yet they are both fresh and personal, votive souvenirs carried home in the confidences of memory.

Littered with the ingredients that texture the rich surfaces of his work - bags of crushed marble, pumice and chalk, vials of bronze powder, lumps of beeswax - there is something of the alchemist's lair about Fry's studio. In these paintings he has conjured his own visual world. Their magic is their ability to illuminate that world by freeing themselves from its constraints.