small essays destined for greatness

Patricia Treib lands in Mexico for the first time from the Big Apple with a colorful collection of strokes in oil on paper that she has called “Oscillations”.

Galerie Nordenhake Mexico presents as of this Thursday the individual exhibition of 35 pieces by the American artist born in Siginaw, Michigan, who later trained at the Art Institute of Chicago and who has lived and has her studio in Brooklyn, New York for 15 years .

The artist offered a tour of her work, which she defines as “observational painting”, to inaugurate the new space of Galerie Nordenhake Mexico City, now based in Colonia Roma Norte.

A compendium of abstract works of art in small format (approximately 21 x 29.7 cm) fed by colours, shapes that suggest flowers, insects, still lifes, fragments of unfinished objects or calligraphic strokes, are the synthesis of the work carried out by Treib in the last six years.

“This is an exhibition that brings together all these works on paper from the last six years and it’s very exciting, yes, to show them, because they are usually things that are very private to me.”

As she points out, the exhibition is an intimate account of the artist about her creative process, unequivocally vital, and although they are finished works in themselves, each and every one of them was the starting point for a later work on canvas, as if Whether it was scripts, sketches or scores for a chromatic pictorial work, reveals Treib.

“I consider these paintings in themselves (…) even though they are small I want them to feel substantial, but at the same time I also use (them), in a certain sense, as models, something that serves as a script, a score, as a reference point for large gestural works, large-scale gestural works that are more physical and corporeal, somewhat large-scale, so in a way they are almost like seeds or a recipe that can blossom into a series of larger pieces” , he points out.

Indeed, the works are seen and felt —provoking endless emotions in the viewer— as a kind of essays with aspiration and destiny of greatness, in many ways, but the most obvious is that of becoming later works embodied in large canvases; however, at the end of the creative process, the tiny oil paintings also end up expressing their own greatness and vivacity, and acquire independence from the final result that is perceived and reflected in the mural format.

About this magic intrinsic to the creative process, Patricia Treib comments:

“The largest compositions are always measured with a visual source, something that I am translating from observation. Each of the large paintings corresponds to a small work on paper that acts as a guide, a kind of script or score. It becomes an anchor or origin point. However, I want there to be a significant change or transformation from an intimate and portable size to a more immersive size. There is a great distance between the two: a space for invention, many ways it could be developed. “I want small works to be like the sheet music of a song or a recipe, something that could be performed in countless ways and given new life, each one marking the moment in which it was made. It is also important for large paintings that they go beyond what I could have imagined, and that I am surprised by what happens,” the artist shares.

paint life

Patricia Treib talks about how she came to abstract art from photography and the exercise of observing to transform the life that is presented to her in “observation painting”.

“In Chicago I started to have a deeper understanding of more direct observational painting and painting life, what you see, but then I also did a lot of photography. Over time I slowly gravitated towards abstraction, but for me I was really connected again, painting from observation and that’s a lot of my work, although in terms of themes, starting point, it seems quite diverse, there’s nothing really unify it except for its sources, which are quite personal to me,” Treib details.

In the exercise of observing, time and visual acuity are required to extract the symbolic essence of things, and Treib also gives an account of this process, and shares with us Things I want to spend time with, which perhaps come from my past in some way or fit in with things that are significant to me, but by approaching those sources I will try to concentrate more on the spaces around the work, and then make a painting from the observation of those more immaterial spaces.

“I’m from all ages”

Patricia refuses to identify herself with the tradition of masculine abstract art in the United States or with any current or specific era, although she acknowledges that she has been nourished by many of them and identifies with all eras.

“I want (my work) to be different from anything I’ve seen before, hopefully, but I’m not trying to carry on a certain “tradition” although there is probably a lot of his work in me already, I’ve seen it, I’ve absorbed it and I’m I am very interested, but I am interested in works from all different periods, such as medieval, Romanesque, our fresco painting from the Pompeii era, I am from all periods. So, not just post-war American painting per se, although I mean I’m interested in color and gesture and so I’m sure it mixes with that tradition, but I’m not immediately citing works in that sense,” she says.

Each of the works that make up the “Oscillations” exhibition is valued at $4,000. The exhibition can be visited from this Thursday until December 17, 2022 at Galerie Nordenhake Mexico City, at Monterrey 65, Colonia Roma Norte.