ATHENS.- “By shedding the merely phenomenal details of the source image—the precise form of the cactus, the adherence to one point perspective—it might be argued that Treib’s paintings effect a comparable shift. Each fresh rendering would by this reasoning represent the further separation—or abstraction—of the image from its mundane origins, progressing by degrees towards the transcendent realm of colour and form. That Treib’s paintings plot the history of the medium’s sophistication would make for a nice introductory essay, if it only corresponded to my experience of her paintings. Because quite the opposite seems to me true. These paintings describe movements back and forth in time at odds not only with linear models of progress but with the notion that the past is ever really past.”
“Take the five paintings (Torso, Torso Variation, Greek Icon Variation, Icon Arms, Icon Armor Variation) to develop from time spent with an icon painting in the Benaki Museum. If you know that the image has been cropped to focus on the negative space between an arm and a torso, then it becomes possible to imagine how the posture of the saint’s body is transformed into these shapes. But there is no sense of these paintings hurrying away from their origin towards the horizon separating the world of experience from the world of forms. Instead—as the titular “variation” implies—they each return to the source material in order to reappraise it. And each reappraisal is generated by a new set of constraints (this version will be sinuous), as a composition for piano is remade each time it is recited.”
Excerpts from catalogue text by Ben Eastham.
Patricia Treib was born in Saginaw, Michigan, and lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. Recent solo exhibitions have been held at Kate MacGarry, London (2024); Galerie Nordenhake, Stockholm (2023); Galerie Nordenhake, Mexico City (2022); Overduin & Co., Los Angeles (2021); Bureau, New York (2020); and Crown Point Press, San Francisco (2018). Group exhibitions include Of Flesh and Air, Galería Marta Cervera, Madrid (2024); Friends in a Field: Conversations with Raoul De Keyser, curated by Douglas Fogle and Hanneke Skerath, Mu.ZEE, Oostende, Belgium (2022); and Field of Vision, Peter Blum, New York (2021).
Treib has participated in residencies at ARCH, Athens (2021), the American Academy in Rome (2017), the Dora Maar House (2014), MacDowell (2013), and was awarded a 2020 Guggenheim Fellowship.
