Patricia Treib

About

Kate MacGarry is pleased to announce Patricia Treib’s third solo show at the gallery. Enfold, the title of Treib’s exhibition, is two-fold by design. The term’s first definition—“to surround or cover completely”—pertains to the immersive scale of Treib’s canvases that seemingly envelop the space of the gallery with sinuous abstract forms and pulsating colors. The term’s second definition—“to hold in your arms”—elucidates the artist’s desired emotional attachments from binding painterly abstractions to her observations of the physical world. “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,” says Treib whose disparate source materials include a torsion pendulum clock, a 1940s Vogue sewing pattern envelope depicting various sleeves, a still life arrangement of several cameras as well as metal body armor from a Greek icon painting. “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,” she concludes.

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 Essay by Erica Cooke.