FABIAN TREIBER

Treiber is an artist dedicated to questioning perceptions of reality through depictions of interior and exterior spaces. He makes decisions about the compositions formally, rather than narratively and in so doing produces the effect that is at once constructive and dissolving, as Treiber describes, the works ‘seem not quite right, but are just right.’ The windows and doorways provide glimpses of landscapes and morning skies, while the staircases and halls expand the pictures, giving the cinematic suggestion of a camera panning across the room. This sense of movement and elongation is heightened in Treiber’s multi-panels paintings.

His works begin with untreated nettle canvas, a soft textile with a practically invisible woven structure. Proceeding slowly, he applies glazed surfaces of paint, then adding lines that overlap to arrive at shapes which form his interiors and finally the objects that ‘inhabit’ them. This process takes place in countless thin layers and with a variety of brushes, airbrushes, and palette knives, sometimes resulting in very thickly painted sections. Treiber avoids making precise allusions to realistic perspective, instead his imagery shifts—at times flat, stretched out, or collapsed.

Playing with the gallery’s architecture, Treiber designed a wall to divide the gallery in half, leaving a narrow opening in the middle to temp visitors to peer through into the next room or cross the threshold. The unusual in-betweenness of this gap in the wall underscores speculative spacial situations depicted in his work, which together are fed by memory, improvisation, and questioning reality.

Fabian Treiber (b. 1986, Ludwigsburg, Germany) studied fine art at the Stuttgart State Academy of Art and Design. His work has shown in solo exhibitions at Kunsthalle Nürnberg; Kunstverein Ludwigsburg; Museum zu Allerheiligen, Schaffhausen; Ruttkowski; 68 Gallery, Cologne and Paris; KANT Gallery, Copenhagen, Haverkampf & Leistenschneider Gallery, Berlin and Galerie Mark Müller, Zurich. Upcoming exhibitions include a group exhibition at Kunstmuseum Singen and solo exhibitions at Ruttkowski;68 Gallery, Dusseldorf and Municipal Gallery of Ostfildern (DE). He was awarded the Karl Schmidt-Rottluff Scholarship for his work up to 2018 and was granted by the Kunsthalle Nürnberg with the Marianne Defet Painting Scholarship the same year. In 2021 he was a finalist for the Große-Hans-Purrmann Prize. Treiber lives and works in Stuttgart, Germany.