Exhibition: Patricia Treib 2025

Patricia Treib, Le Cinture, 2025, Oil on canvas, 72 × 108 in. (182.88 × 274.32 cm)

Bureau is pleased to announce our third solo exhibition with Patricia Treib, Sinuations. The exhibition will cover both floors of the gallery and will feature a suite of large oil paintings along with framed paintings on paper.  Accompanying the exhibition is a new text about Treib’s work by art historian Erin Kimmel, below.

The shapes in Patricia Treib’s paintings are wet and buoyant. Pools of pigment, they bend and bulge, unfurling themselves in one plump lobe and then another (and sometimes another). Just as soon, they pinch and squeeze, tapering into creases with razor sharp edges. Sometimes they are suspended alone, or in doubles, that dominate the always alive picture plane. Often, they nestle into one another or curl into active grounds. Succulent lines slide around these shapes in quick, buttery succession and often end after a flourish or flit. In Sinuations, these elements hang together in strange orchestrations that recall a vocabulary of ornament: arabesques, curlicues, volutes, pedestals, garlands, ribbons and rosettes. But it’s the uncanny side of ornament at play here, the mystery of adornment’s arcane origins and enduring appeal. Treib’s paintings model the occult subjectivity of the hand-made mark—an integral part of being alive. 

By turns quietly radiant and boldly urgent, snaking configurations and arching lines appeal to the flexibility of the eye and the body’s mobility. In canvases like Le Cinture and Fuchsia Sleeve, off-white illuminated surfaces lend airy syncopation. As if in rejoinder, the sensuous and earthen grounds of other canvases push forward into the viewers’ space. In Antiparian, a watery mocha field eddies and swirls, and does a few hard-edge turns, around a large turquoise brooch, peach flutes and a bombastically lush emerald green foliation. It’s lavish and odd, carnal and ethereal too. 

Just as Treib’s shapes frustrate language—or perhaps, demand a certain lexical acumen—there is a jarring yet well-whetted dissonance to her use of color. Similarly high-keyed on the value scale, she deploys combinations that ring in the same manner as a minor chord. In Sheer Sleeve, for example, the nebulous, icy blue of the dominant shape is enveloped by a midnight blue so clarion it beckons one to dive in. But a screeching yellow tendril and rich shamrock lines interrupt the clarity of that call. At once consonant and ghostly, the painting, like the show writ large, scintillates with studied, enigmatic exuberance. —Erin Kimmel

Patricia Treib (b. 1979 Saginaw, MI; lives and works in Brooklyn, NY) received her BFA from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago (2001), and an MFA from Columbia University (2006). Recent solo exhibitions include Icon Arms, ARCH, Athens, Greece (2024); Enfold, Kate MacGarry, London, United Kingdom (2024); Undulations, Galerie Nordenhake, Stockholm, Sweden (2023); Oscillations, Galerie Nordenhake, Mexico City, Mexico (2022); Variations, F, Houston, TX (2021); Sleeve Variations, Overduin & Co., Los Angeles, CA (2021); Arm Measures, Bureau, New York, NY (2020); Limbs, Kate MacGarry, London, United Kingdom (2019); Grotesquerie, Galerie Nordenhake, Stockholm, Sweden (2018); Crown Point Press, San Francisco, CA (2018); Interstices, Bureau, New York, NY (2017). She has participated in residencies at ARCH Athens (2021); the American Academy in Rome (2017), the Dora Maar House (2014), and MacDowell (2013). Treib was a recipient of the 2017 Artadia Award and a 2020 Guggenheim Fellowship. Her work is held in the collection of the Aïshti Foundation, Jal El Dib, Lebanon; Colby College Museum of Art, Waterville, ME; the Achenbach Foundation for Graphic Arts, Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, San Fransisco, CA; The Morgan Library & Museum, New York, NY; the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; the Rollins Museum of Art, Rollins College, Winter Park, FL; and the RISD Museum, Providence, RI.