Galerie
Mark Müller

When does a form become a thing, when does color on canvas become representation? Abstraction and figuration – these are the poles between which Fabian Treiber’s latest works are situated. The emphatic search and finding of figurative elements in purely abstract works is playful for Treiber. The opening up of his painting to the intended figurative and to genres such as landscape and still life seems only consistent. The latest works act as visual arguments of a courageous attitude. What once seemed liberating – the abstraction in its sincerity of wanting to be no more, than what it is – over time became a self-chosen cage for the artist, from which he consciously breaks out. It is the simple things that surround us, which in the series »common things« get their way into the picture, a table, a vase, a carpet that embeds the scene. Nevertheless, these new paintings seem like a challenge to the viewer, or as Fabian Treiber puts it: “There was always something disturbing”.

At what point does a square shape become a table, a rectangle a living room carpet or a triangle a flower vase? When do two pink ellipses think of a pair of fluffy slippers, and when does a green square associate with a ping-pong table? Where is the demarcation line, where an abstract-geometric form becomes a familiar object?

The Kunsthalle Nürnberg presents works by Fabian Treiber, the current Marianne Defet Painting Fellow, in a solo exhibition at the Kunsthaus. The paintings of the artist, born in 1986, are reminiscent of surreal living landscapes and provide a view into an interior equipped with the most diverse protagonists of a bourgeois Existence: table, chair and mini bar, candle holders and house plants, carpet and curtains. Image composition and motifs are reminiscent of the painting style of the interior and at the same time an exuberant still life of everyday things.

But even if the viewer can recognize and name a multitude of painted objects, what they see remains strangely vague and inexplicable. The impression of familiarity is combined with a moment of irritation, because like in a dream or a nebulous memory there are no reliable parameters. This impression arises because Fabian Treiber resists the urge for concretization and completion during the production process. He succeeds in creating a kind of hybrid painting that appears both abstract and figurative and cleverly negotiates the elementary questions of painting in terms of form and structure, color and composition, spatiality and distribution of space.

The exhibition will be accompanied by the publication “Late Night on the Floor, What Language Is I Speaking”, with texts by Invar-Torre Hollaus, Harriet Zilch and an interview with Fabian Treiber and Marcus Weber.