Artist: Fabian Treiber

Cob presents two solo exhibitions split across the gallery space – both exhibitions are the UK debut solo exhibitions for each artist.

These exhibitions continue Cob’s dual exhibition programme. Curated across the split level of the gallery, each exhibition is to be experienced individually and in dialogue with one another; the work suspended, in ‘conversation’.

The upper level of the gallery will display Busywork an exhibition of new paintings by American artist Ginny Casey. The lower level of the gallery will display Bruised, a new painting cycle for German artist Fabian Treiber.

Both Casey and Treiber’s work play with that which is recognisable and empty it of its familiarity, forcing the viewer to reconceptualise our relationship to these items and spaces. Taken together, their work reflects and refracts a similar preoccupation with specificity and absence and creates a shimmering dialogue categorised by surreal voids.

Both Casey & Treiber can be compared in their respective psychoanalytical approach to the domestic space and the objects contained within.

Fabian Treiber | Bruised | Gallery Two

Working in painting “cycles”, German artist Fabian Treiber’s new exhibition, Bruised, features a new suite of large scale diptychs and small scale mixed media paintings on nettle substrates. The exhibition title reflects narratively unstable situations in the paintings and their precarious swell within.

Fabian Treiber (b. 1986, Ludwigsburg Germany) is an artist based in Stuttgart, Germany. He studied fine art at the Stuttgart State Academy of Art and Design. The artist has dedicated himself, formally speaking, to the subject of the interior and the exterior in his paintings, using it to question subjective projections and our perception of reality.

Treiber’s diptych-panelled format has come to define his practice. Just as the canvas structure is integral to the development of his imagery, so it is form, rather than narrative, that guides his decision-making process. In this way, he provokes a conscious break, thus declaring what is supposedly false as the very quality of painting, with the effect that his works somehow seem both not quite right, and perfectly poised.

Treiber’s interior and exterior spaces do not refer to real models, but are fed by memories, experiences and speculations. The paintings question, what do empty interior and exterior spaces do to us? What do they remind us of? And in these uninhibited spaces, fragments of bodies float, a hand, an arm, a leg, thus positing absence as an embodied state.

An exhibition text from writer Louise Parfitt accompanies the exhibition.