Patricia Treib »Oscillations«

Galerie Nordenhake México is pleased to present Oscillations, a solo exhibition by the American artist Patricia Treib, who was born in Saginaw, Michigan, and lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.

For Treib’s first exhibition with Galerie Nordenhake México, Oscillations brings together thirty-five small paintings on paper from the past six years. Treib’s intimate-sized paintings are both works in themselves and serve as scripts for large oil works on canvas.

“The larger compositions are always measured against a visual source, something that I’m translating from observation. Every large painting has a corresponding small work on paper that acts as a guide, a type of script or score. It becomes an anchor or a point of origin. However, I want there to be a significant shift or transformation from an intimate, hand-held size to a more immersive size. There is a great distance between the two—room for invention, many ways that it could unfold. I want the small works to be like the notation of a song or a recipe, something that could be performed in innumerable ways and given new life—each one marking the time at which it was made. It’s also important for the large paintings to go beyond what I could have imagined, and to be surprised by what happens.” *

Through deliberate placement and juxtaposition of small paintings along the perimeter of the gallery, this exhibition weaves together several motifs that have developed nonlinearly, over many years, within Treib’s work. While several paintings may share the same visual source—a 1940s Vogue sewing pattern envelope seen through the limbs of a pencil cactus, an antique Anniversary clock, a still life of 35mm cameras, found stones from Asturias—each piece branches off and diverges from the others, emphasizing each work’s singularity and difference. In approaching these diverse sources, Treib will begin by making several small paintings from observation—each time shifting attention to the less-nameable areas, allowing these spaces to supersede the identifiable objects through the way they are painted. “These in-between spaces have no fixed identity—they are contingent on one’s position in space and are therefore constantly changing, even when standing in one place. I want the paintings to embody a sense of fluctuation and instability in perception.” *

• “Patricia Treib in Converstation,” an interview with Ben Lerner, from Patricia Treib, 2020.

As part of the public program of the exhibition the gallery presents a conversation between Patricia Treib and Jeffrey Stucker, artist and professor based in LA.

Accompanying the exhibition the gallery publishes an artist book, which consists in a facsimile version of the sketch book from which the selection of oil paintings on paper come from. The publication is edited by Toni Sadurní, director and partner of Galerie Nordenhake Mexico, and includes an essay by Jeffrey Stucker.