Patricia Treib

Treib's elegant abstractions rely on washy passages of oil paint depicting forms that are nonreferential, though they are in some cases borrowed from representational sources—part of a sleeve, for example, lifted from a fresco by Italian Renaissance master Piero della Francesca. You don't need to know that to drink in Treib's aqueous colors, or to appreciate the attention paid to the spaces between forms, as well as on the forms themselves. There's a definite echo of Matisse to these compositions, which are nonetheless thoroughly contemporary.