Patricia Treib

The spaces that float between the tactile world we inhabit are so often made to appear invisible. Yet a space devoid of human presence is a fertile ground for memory and an opportunity to bear witness to the overlooked.

The true subject of Patricia Treib’s paintings tends to be these spaces. Peripheral elements become central presences. Her quasi-alphabetic forms, albeit abstract, resemble the negative space between objects set up in her Brooklyn studio.

A clock shop owned by Treib’s father in her hometown of Saginaw, Michigan, was Treib’s first experience of an artist’s studio. Cuckoo clocks, Kit-Cat clocks with moving eyes, and nineteenth-century clocks filled the shelves of his shop and became a tactile, visual reference library for Treib, and unknowingly, her first introduction to art.

Working from observation, the artist anchors these non-concrete voids with a sense of solidity in each painting. Treib lays the canvas on the floor, then using wide hake brushes ordinarily used for ink painting to sweep the paint across the flat surface. The result is washy, rhythmic plains, immersive in scale; nearly all executed in a single day.