Anat Ebgi is pleased to present new paintings by German artist Fabian Treiber. The exhibition, entitled I Take The Whole Damn Place With Me, is the artists’s second solo exhibition at the gallery. On view at 6150 Wilshire Blvd, Los Angeles from September 13 to November 1. An opening reception will be held on Saturday, September 13, 6-8 pm.

Spontaneity of gesture and response to material drive the engine of Fabian Treiber’s paintings. Swaths of thinned paint, crisp masked edges, and abrupt textural shifts signal a process attuned the examination of artifice and pictorial mechanics. Flattened perspective, compressed space, and abrupt visual breaks push up to the bounds of representation. The starting point for these paintings lies in fragments taken from the empty backgrounds of early Hollywood animations: interiors, landscapes, transitional zones originally designated as passive scenery. The resulting pictorial spaces resist fixed interpretation, hovering between found image and painterly invention. 

Memory becomes a central operative force, not as nostalgia or as recollection of what was, but as an unstable state to linger in. His paintings adhere to the logic of déjà vu: recognition without origin, the disquieting feeling of the familiar as it slips into strangeness. Treiber treats the built environment like an exquisite corpse of sorts—part home, part, set part studio—these rooms open onto diorama-like vistas; landscape slips indoors as decor. The result is a lucid, slightly uncanny vocabulary of props, portals, and stages. Windows that frame pastoral fragments, and sinks and pipes that connect literal lines bisecting the picture plane. Curtains, carpets, bits of fabric perform acts of revealing and concealing.

A recurring cast of props, plants, and personal effects unite these environments. Emblematic trees reappear at different scales; circular moons rhyme with faucet handles, basins, and glass rims; abandoned shoes mark the stage like floors. Treiber uses these motifs as pictorial devices, as anchoring points around his varied paint languages. Airbrushed haze, scumbled passages, cartoon-outline notations, and paste-ups share the same field. Treiber indulges the pleasure of atmosphere and color while skirting the seamlessness of illusion. 

Day, dusk, and night cohabitate. Rags, pipes, patched walls share the surface of pastoral longing. These modest elements do double duty: a flame is mark and illumination, a shred of cloth is decor and gesture, a thread is a line that remembers a hand. These works remind us that a view is a construction where the scenic and the architectural are painterly problems. Larger canvases expand painting into rooms that borrow from the cinematic, assemblages fold the picture plane into the scale of a keepsake.

Functioning as a discreet suite, Treiber’s new framed “painting-assemblages” compress these questions to an intimate scale, sharpening the stakes. Each small panel builds a tiny proscenium from found materials. Pleated cloth, linen valances, brass tacks, bottle caps, scraps of paper, and matchbooks are set against stained or oversprayed grounds. Curtains promise access, yet question what is revealed is often a charged field of color or a tonal xeroxed photographic ghosts, conjuring, carrying, concealing.

I Take The Whole Damn Place With Me asks how images remember, how they linger as afterimage, echo, palimpsest. Insisting on both construction and atmosphere, the exhibition hinges the romance of light and color against the gritty process of painterly assembly. Landscape is treated as portable, something open, psychologically and poetically charged. These paintings remind us that a view is never given, but built: sites where seeing becomes an act of making.