PATRICIA TREIB

Treib seeks to embrace—to enfold—painting as the material outcome of sustained looking and rehearsed movement. In Treib’s oeuvre, every large-scale painting corresponds to several hand-held sized works on paper, in which she develops the composition through varied repetition, oftentimes over the course of years, but never in a sequential manner. Once her body and mind have been primed to the composition, as if committing it to muscle memory, the artist lays the canvas on the floor and uses wide hake brushes to apply thinned-down washes of pigment, frequently erasing gestures and then repeating them until each painterly mark appears organic in relation to the next. To attain this impression of an underlying sense of rhythm, Treib executes each painting in the span of a single day. ‘The paintings develop through an accumulation of rehearsals,’ she explains. ‘I want the memory of these previous attempts to be compounded into the final work—and for the initial impression of spontaneity to be at odds with a more measured and deliberate internal structure.’ Ultimately, if abstraction is largely understood as an act of distancing—of pulling away from something or someone—, Treib’s abstraction compels the opposite motion: hers is a pictorial language of closeness and intimacy that, in turn, envelops us in her surrounding world.

Excerpt from text by Erica Cooke.

Press release courtesy Kate MacGarry