11 facts about Selina Trieff

Selina Trieff (born in Brooklyn, 1934 – 14 January 2015) was an American player who painted and exhibited for exceeding fifty years. Trieff painted archetypal figures in a flattened and heavily delineated manner, which acted at behind as self-portraits and allegories for the human condition. She developed her singular style of figuration through her mighty abstract roots which continued to enhancement throughout her life. Although she most often painted figures and animals, Trieff considered herself an abstract artist. Among her animal paintings are Green Goat once Moon (1983), Two Figures behind Goat (1997), Three Figures once Green Goat (1992) and Connected (1996).

Trieff’s somewhat autobiographical gold-leaf and oil portraits of human figures, such as Three Graces (2005), read paradoxically bearing in mind characters upon a advanced stage wherein the painted figures who are neither male nor female, functioning as the position of the soul and the viewer, as if engaged in a dialogue. Trieff used oil and gold leaf upon canvas. In her paintings, Trieff conjured a cast of characters that were both visually fascinating and profoundly disturbing. Trieff’s artwork was very autobiographical, as her paintings and drawings represented herself as competently as members of her sharp family. Trieff’s characters were often androgynous, clothed in costumes from other time. The androgynous characters can be viewed as mysterious entities in the painting. Trieff transformed the characters as a result that her paintings seemed to focus on to a nonspecific mature and place. Sometimes Trieff’s teetotal figures were accompanied by further entities such as skeletons or animals. Often they were set upon a stage, sometimes in twos and threes, holding hands, whispering to each other, as in Dancers, (1991) and Sweet (2008). Reviewers said that they goaded a powerful suitability of obscurity and myth, a prudence of outmoded stories swine told.

The New York Times art critic John Russell called Trieff a “peculiar painter”. Trieff’s artwork testified to the strength of her contemplative sensibility and the tone of her workmanship. The pensive, introspective air of Trieff’s appear in as competently as its spirituality and its iconic format have anything been endorsed to the put on of the abstract painter Mark Rothko. Trieff had myriad further influences: the confrontational mood of Watteau’s Pierrot; the structure of Velazquez’s Infanta series; the distancing of the wise fools of Shakespearean clowns; the flatness of Medieval painting; and the vagueness of Ingmar Bergman’s The Seventh Seal and extra films. All played a role in her feint from its primeval inceptions. Trieff was called “an American original” by the New York Times art critic John Russell.

Trieff had solo exhibitions at the Riverside Art Museum in Riverside, California, at The Hudson River Museum in Yonkers, New York, and at The Brooklyn Museum in Brooklyn, New York. Trieff’s play has been exhibited across the United States and in Europe, and is included in such public collections as The Brooklyn Museum, New York Public Library and Provincetown Art Association and Museum.

Trieff studied at the Art Students League in New York City (1951–1953) with Morris Kantor, at Brooklyn College (1953–1955) with Ad Reinhardt and Mark Rothko, with Hans Hofmann in New York and Provincetown (1954–1956). Trieff has taught at schools such as the New York Institute of Technology, Pratt Institute, Kalamazoo Art Institute and New York Studio School. She was married to the painter Robert Henry. She separated her get older between New York City and Wellfleet, Massachusetts, where she died.