PATRICIA TREIB

Patricia Treib abstracts ordinary items found in everyday life—cups on tables, textiles on floors, anatomical features of a person—to their bare essences. Treib pares these figures down through deep observation and making many sketches. What was once visible becomes unrecognizable to the uninitiated eye, yet Treib retains the emotional pull the objects have on her. Once they are fully committed to muscle memory, Treib paints the composition on a monumental canvas in one day, blending immediacy with intimate knowledge and feeling.

Treib’s paintings can feel knowable yet unknowable at the same time and are deceptively simple. They also often present more questions than answers. Shoulder, a painting once in an exhibition titled Limbs, guides us to imagine the bulbous blue shapes as appendage bones or the curvatures of a vessel. Treib’s darkened green lines—lyrical and calligraphic—flow across the canvas, connecting shapes together as if they are a part of musical score, the blue notes dancing along their wispy chords. 

Describing her work, Treib writes: 

I need to have a personal connection to the visual source that I’m starting with. It’s not arbitrary; I need to feel an emotional tie to the source and for it to continually radiate and not fully reveal itself…In turn, I want the painting to be imbued with this personal connection—for it to manifest through resonant color and a sensuous material presence—for it to be ingrained, but not ‘readable’ or ‘represented’ through known signifiers.