Fabian Treiber Sunrise Doesn't Last All Morning, 2022, Anat Ebgi, Installation view
About
German artist Fabian Treiber is dedicated to questioning perceptions of reality through depictions of interior and exterior spaces. He approaches these compositions formally, rather than narratively and in so doing produces environments that are at once constructive and dissolving. As he describes, the works “seem not quite right, but are just right.” This conscious break posits that what is supposedly false and constructed, is in fact the essential quality of a painting. Windows and doorways provide glimpses of landscapes and morning skies, while interior staircases and halls expand his pictures, embracing a cinematic suggestion of movement, elongation, and narrative.
Fabian Treiber (b. 1986, Ludwigsburg Germany) studied Fine Art at the Stuttgart State Academy of Art and Design, Stuttgart, Germany. He was awarded the Karl Schmidt-Rottluff Scholarship for his work up to 2018 and was granted by the Kunsthalle Nürnberg with the Marianne Defet Painting Scholarship the same year. In 2021 he was a finalist for the Große-Hans-Purrmann Prize. His works have been shown in solo exhibitions at Kunsthalle Nürnberg; Kunstverein Ludwigsburg; Museum zu Allerheiligen, Schaffhausen; Ruttkowski;68 Gallery, Cologne and Paris; KANT Gallery, Copenhagen, Haverkampf Leistenschneider Gallery, Berlin and Galerie Mark Müller, Zurich. Further in group exhibitions at Kunsthalle Düsseldorf; Villa Merkel Galerien der Stadt Esslingen a.N.; Staatliche Kunsthalle Baden-Baden; Kunstverein Speyer, Arts Projects Australia, Melbourne; CFHILL Art Space, Stockholm; König Gallery, Berlin; and Kunstverein Lüneburg. His 2022 solo exhibition Sunrise Doesn’t Last All Morning at Anat Ebgi, Los Angeles, CA was the artist’s debut in the United States. Treiber lives and works in Stuttgart, Germany.
Fabian Treiber The Descent (Would You Stay And Keep Me Company), 2023
Acrylic, Ink, Oil Crayon and Pastels on Nettle
63 x 43 ⁵⁄₁₆ inches / 160 x 110 cm
"I think there are numerous starting points on different levels, which can all lead to the same feeling, the feeling of absence, of temporality — in short of ephemerality. There are signs that stand for temporality and even caducity." —Fabian Treiber
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Playing with color and focus, the artist engages ideas of memory and dreams, with the otherworldly aesthetic leading to questions about the nature of reality. Unique to Treiber’s work is the use of formal rather than narrative techniques, allowing the viewer to arrive at deeply personal conclusions about what they see. —USA Art News
"I've learned that emotions don't provide a good guide for me. I believe this can even be seen in the paintings. Almost nothing anecdotal is revealed by me in them, although, as I mentioned earlier, countless fragments seep through me into the paintings. Therefore, when painting, I strive to create a certain cool harmony and distance right up until the end." —Fabian Treiber
"I think time works on many different levels in my paintings. I’ve always been fascinated of time in paintings. I mean, a painting in general contains and deals with so many kinds of time. I think a painting is always compressed or even distilled time, and in that, the good paintings have this tremendous energy. An energy that they are always trying to expand." —Fabian Treiber
The artist has dedicated himself formally speaking to the subject of the interior in his paintings, using it to question subjective projections and our perception of reality. —Mélanie Goussard
Fabian Treiber, Andreas Schulze, Philip Emde present the group exhibition “Mein Hut der hat drei Ecken”
The multigenerational living German artists boldly stand alone in their own style and collectively create a visual dialogue within this exhibition. The positions drift apart from each other in a seemingly playful way and unite again in an emancipative moment of painting itself which unfolds here in a hat of three corners. —Art Rabbit
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After years of focus on depicting interiors, Stuttgart-based artist Fabian Treiber’s recent paintings instead present imaginary landscapes, from moonlit desert scenes to vaguely tropical horizons. The artist works first by translating perceptions into sketches, then translating these onto canvas. —Artnet News
Fabian Treiber's multi-colored interiors and landscapes are peculiar and somewhat difficult to categorize. They depict fictional, uninhabited spatial structures that leave us puzzled, bewildered, and yet emotionally touched. The artist creates a prototypical "inner world" to which we are exposed and with which we are left alone. —Carolin Kralapp
We're yet to dedicate a full feature to Fabian Treiber whose explorations of space (mostly interiors), we've been thoroughly enjoying for some time now. After missing on featuring his great solo presentation with Ruttkowski 48 in Paris, we wanted to announce the release of his limited editions he's been developing together with VogelART. —Juxtapoz
Treiber attaches multiple canvases together, physically expanding the painterly space. Indications such as time, space, and the surface of the image collide and begin to interact with the viewer. The viewer now becomes an integral part of the painting—to a certain extent an accomplice—and yet they remain powerless in front of the works. —Roy Owh
"Over the years, a certain process has developed in which one image often provokes the next, spurs it on in parallel or provides the idea for it. So yes, it is rather the process that provides the next convergence. You can perhaps imagine that the pictures are in close proximity to each other while they are being created, and I endeavour to play more of a moderating role and to work out the substance of each picture." —Fabian Treiber
In the process of painting, Treiber makes decisions based on formal considerations, not narrative ones. This leads to "the images somehow not being right but still being correct. The incorrectness emancipates painting and designates it as an autonomous entity." —Wilhelm Werthern
"For me, it's about the idea of a plant. I don't need to paint a Monstera. When the viewer hesitates to take a closer look, they linger on the image. That might be a crude notion of mine, but I feel that something that looks like a flower vase and, for example, has become overly bulky and large, is much more conducive to painting than a clearly recognizable object." —Fabian Treiber
News from City Hall | Fabian Treiber Art Conversation for Curious Seniors
His works occasionally evoke the genre of interior scenes, but arrangements that reference still life also play a central role in Treiber's paintings. Nevertheless, his works cannot be unequivocally assigned to any of these genres, as a key concern of the artist is to explore at what point in the process of painting a form becomes a recognizable object – for example, when a rectangle becomes a bed, a triangle becomes a vase, or an oval shape becomes a flower or a shoe. —City of Nürnberg
Fabian Treiber Awarded the Karl Schmidt-Rottluff Scholarhsip
Academy graduate Fabian Treiber has been awarded the Karl Schmidt-Rottluff Scholarship for outstanding artistic achievements. The scholarship is granted every two years to up to five visual artists who have completed their studies and are exclusively or predominantly freelancing.
Fabian Treiber’s Beautifully Disturbing Abstraction Interferes With the Normal
"My work is very process-based, so the process, in general, is somehow the main topic of my entire work. I define it often as a kind of dialogue between me and the painting, which starts often with a first sketch on a raw canvas. From this point on I am, you could say, circling around some terms or perceptions, which I try to transfer directly onto the canvas." —Fabian Treiber
In the works of the artist Fabian Treiber, the viewer is immersed in abstract pictorial worlds in which amorphous forms and structures, intertwined with supposedly familiar elements, to formulate complex pictorial themes. —Markus Tristan Lorenz
Dual Exhibition by Fabian Hübner and Fabian Treiber
He has transitioned to a kind of "work in progress" approach, which partially releases him from the role of author or director but also serves as a good mechanism for testing intuitive seeing: if the shifts from green to tree or blue to sky become too pronounced, the mechanism ensures the realization in time: "You can't do it like that." Treiber creates his color-rich works with oil paint and synthetic resin on canvas. —André Pause
![This image depicts an artwork by Fabian Treiber titled "Another Day Wasted." This artwork was created in 2023 and measures 140 x 230 cm [HxW] (55 ¹⁄₈" x 90 ⁹⁄₁₆"). Its medium is Acrylic, Ink, Oil Crayon and Pastels on Nettle.](https://anatebgi.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/10/Fabian-Treiber_FT1023_1697219527.jpg)
![This image depicts an artwork by Fabian Treiber titled "The Descent (Would You Stay And Keep Me Company)." This artwork was created in 2023 and measures 160 x 110 cm [HxW] (63" x 43 ⁵⁄₁₆"). Its medium is Acrylic, Ink, Oil Crayon and Pastels on Nettle.](https://anatebgi.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/10/Fabian-Treiber_FT1024_1697219526.jpg)
![This image depicts an artwork by Fabian Treiber titled "The Comeback." This artwork was created in 2023 and measures 110 x 90 cm [HxW] (43 ⁵⁄₁₆" x 35 ⁷⁄₁₆"). Its medium is Acrylic, Ink, Oil Crayon and Pastels on Nettle.](https://anatebgi.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/10/Fabian-Treiber_FT1022_1697219528.jpg)
![This image depicts an artwork by Fabian Treiber titled "Seasons Pass All These Precious Things." This artwork was created in 2022 and measures 55" x 98 ³⁄₄" [HxW] (139.7 x 250.83 cm). Its medium is Acrylic, Ink, Oil Crayon and Pastels on Nettle.](https://anatebgi.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/08/Fabian-Treiber_FT1006_1660849876.jpg)
![This image depicts an artwork by Fabian Treiber titled "Somewhere Along The Line." This artwork was created in 2022 and measures 55" x 126 ¹⁄₄" [HxW] (139.7 x 320.68 cm). Its medium is Acrylic, Ink, Oil Crayon and Pastels on Nettle.](https://anatebgi.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/08/Fabian-Treiber_FT1005_1660849947.jpg)
![This image depicts an artwork by Fabian Treiber titled "Early Bloomers." This artwork was created in 2022 and measures 59" x 55 ¹⁄₄" [HxW] (149.86 x 140.34 cm). Its medium is Acrylic, Ink, Oil Crayon and Pastels on Nettle.](https://anatebgi.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/08/Fabian-Treiber_FT1007_1660849861.jpg)
![This image depicts an artwork by Fabian Treiber titled "That Yellow Haze." This artwork was created in 2022 and measures 55" x 106 ¹⁄₂" [HxW] (139.7 x 270.51 cm). Its medium is Acrylic, Ink, Oil Crayon and Pastels on Nettle.](https://anatebgi.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/08/Fabian-Treiber_FT1004_1660849955.jpg)
![This image depicts an artwork by Fabian Treiber titled "Lose Contact." This artwork was created in 2022 and measures 59" x 43 ¹⁄₂" [HxW] (149.86 x 110.49 cm). Its medium is Acrylic, Ink, Oil Crayon and Pastels on Nettle.](https://anatebgi.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/08/Fabian-Treiber_FT1008_1660849883.jpg)
![This image depicts an artwork by Fabian Treiber titled "Country Life." This artwork was created in 2022 and measures 15" x 11" [HxW] (38.1 x 27.94 cm). Its medium is Acrylic, Ink and Pastels on Lana Vanguard Paper.](https://anatebgi.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/08/Fabian-Treiber_FT1020_1660849843.jpg)
![This image depicts an artwork by Fabian Treiber titled "Country Life." This artwork was created in 2022 and measures 11" x 15" [HxW] (27.94 x 38.1 cm). Its medium is Acrylic, Ink and Pastels on Lana Vanguard Paper.](https://anatebgi.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/08/Fabian-Treiber_FT1015_1660849851.jpg)
![This image depicts an artwork by Fabian Treiber titled "Pale Shelter." This artwork was created in 2021 and measures 140 x 120 cm [HxW] (55 ¹⁄₈" x 47 ¹⁄₄"). Its medium is Acrylic, ink and oil pastel on canvas.](https://anatebgi.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/06/Fabian-Treiber_FT1000_1654894314.jpg)
![This image depicts an artwork by Fabian Treiber titled "Driftwood Coming in Waves." This artwork was created in 2022 and measures 55 ¹⁄₈" x 78 ³⁄₄" [HxW] (140.03 x 200.03 cm). Its medium is Acrylic, Ink, Oil Crayon and Pastels on Nettle.](https://anatebgi.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/06/Fabian-Treiber_FT1001_1654894316.jpg)
![This image depicts an artwork by Fabian Treiber titled "This Place." This artwork was created in 2022 and measures 180 x 90 x 5 cm [HxWxD] (70 ⁷⁄₈" x 35 ⁷⁄₁₆" x 1 ³¹⁄₃₂"). Its medium is Acrylic, ink and oil pastel on canvas.](https://anatebgi.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/06/Fabian-Treiber_FT1002_1654894316-scaled.jpg)
![This image depicts an artwork by Fabian Treiber titled "Over and Over Every Single Night." This artwork was created in 2022 and measures 55" x 98 ³⁄₄" [HxW] (139.7 x 250.83 cm). Its medium is Acrylic, Ink, Oil Crayon and Pastels on Nettle.](https://anatebgi.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/05/Fabian-Treiber_FT1003_1683052069.jpg)
