Independent New York
May 5 - 8
Spring Studios
50 Varick Street, New York, NY 10013

Patricia Treib’s large paintings begin as small oil on paper works that are meditations on a particular visual source—two and three dimensional objects arranged in restrained stilllifes in her studio. Selecting one of these smaller works, she produces her larger paintings in a single sitting, a performance guided by the script of the smaller piece. Standing over the canvas, which is laid flat on the ground, the movement of her brushstrokes suggests the choreographic element of her process, which is often attempted several times before arriving at the final work. Contrasting Treib’s role as recorder of her original source material to that of the camera, Joanna Fiduccia writes: “Her paintings are deliberate where the snapshot is casual, bodily where it is cyclopic, and temporal where it is instantaneous.”

Lois Dodd’s small, intimately-scaled paintings are almost always completed in one pleinair sitting. For over fifty years she has painted her immediate everyday surroundings at the places she has chosen to live and work – the Lower East Side, rural Mid-Coast Maine and the Delaware Water Gap. Her quick paintings result from the slow understanding of places and her own place in them. After selecting a subject that balances the “tension between the stability of geometry and the dynamism of passing effects” (Faye Hirsch, 2017), she constructs the forms of the subject upon her chosen surface, regularly utilizing small Masonite and aluminum roofing panels, the latter of which she calls “Flashings.” She often returns to familiar motifs—gardens, forests, windows—repeatedly at different times of the year with dramatically varied results. While approaching their source material through varied avenues, both artists are grounded in the immediacy and focused intention of creating their paintings, each in a single sitting, wherein thin paint reveals light filled works, and the concentrated process of creation is disclosed in the intimacy that results.

– EC

All works by Patricia Treib courtesy BUREAU, New York