Fabian TreiberGermany

Fabian Treiber (b. 1986, Ludwigsburg, lives and works in Stuttgart, DE) explores how images shape perception before they are consciously understood. Working in painting, he develops pictorial spaces that appear immediately familiar yet gradually resist coherent interpretation. Rather than depicting places, objects or interiors, his paintings investigate the pictorial common sense—the largely invisible set of visual conventions through which images become legible in the first place.

Treiber’s practice moves between visual memory, projection and shared pictorial logics. Many works begin with fragments of found imagery — most recently backgrounds from early Hollywood animation — which are transferred onto unprimed canvas and subsequently transformed through painting. These borrowed structures serve less as motifs than as points of departure, allowing painting itself to test, distort and renegotiate the assumptions embedded within them.

The resulting spaces remain unstable. Perspective shifts, scales drift and objects oscillate between recognizability and abstraction. Familiar visual cues invite orientation while simultaneously undermining it, creating images that hover between recollection and invention.

For Treiber, painting is less a way of describing the world than a means of examining the conditions under which it becomes visible. Rather than offering stable meanings, his paintings keep perception in motion, exposing seeing itself as an act of making. In this sense, certainty is never inherent to the image, but continuously produced by those who look at it.

Fabian Treiber studied Fine Arts at the Staatliche Akademie der Bildenden Künste Stuttgart, graduating in 2015 before completing the Weissenhof Program as a Meisterschüler in 2016. He received the Karl Schmidt-Rottluff Scholarship in 2018 and received the Cité Internationale de Paris Residency in 2026. His work has been presented in solo and group exhibitions at institutions including Kunsthalle Nürnberg, Museum zu Allerheiligen Schaffhausen, Kunstverein Ludwigsburg, Städtische Galerie Singen and Anat Ebgi Gallery, Los Angeles. His paintings are held in numerous public and private collections throughout Europe, the U.S. and Asia. Treiber lives and works in Stuttgart.