Galerie
Mark Müller

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.