see you next Tuesday
www.seeyounexttuesday.ch
Schwarzwaldallee 39
4058 Basel
Partner gallery: Galerie Heike Strelow
Judith Stairs
Judith Trepp (born in New York City in 1941) studied at Bard College before moving to Zurich in 1970, where she still lives and works today. Shortly after her arrival, she founded Quilts Unlimited, a textile studio and production center dedicated to both traditional quilting techniques and her own contemporary designs. Trepp often refers to these early years in textile and color design as a crucial, extremely formative period of training—a time when her keen sense of chromatic nuances was honed and the foundation for her later painterly idiom was laid.
In 1987, she participated in the interdisciplinary COLLARCH program for female architects and painters organized by the Zurich Association of Master Painters and Plasterers. Her exploration of built space and its crafts led directly to her first solo exhibition and a major commission for large-format murals in a residential development in Hasliberg, Switzerland. Further commissions for institutional and organizational spaces followed. Since 1989, Trepp has exhibited extensively in Switzerland, England, and the USA, including a solo exhibition at the Provincetown Art Association and Museum (PAAM) in 2010.
Her works have been featured at numerous international art fairs, including Art Chicago, Art Miami, the London Art Fair, and KIAF Seoul, and can be found in private and public collections in Switzerland, Italy, the United Kingdom, and the United States. Trepp describes her approach as thinking "from the wall," an attitude that decisively shapes her works on canvas in oil, egg tempera, or pigment with tempera. In addition, she creates works on handmade Indian paper with acrylic or Japanese ink, as well as sculptural works in brushed stainless steel with automotive paint.
Her visual language is minimalist, yet imbued with emotional intensity and intuitive clarity—sustained by what she calls "active silence." A widely traveled artist, Trepp spent extended periods of time in India and Japan, as well as in various regions of Asia, Europe, and the United States. These experiences have significantly influenced her artistic thinking and expanded her practice with a multi-layered cultural and philosophical perspective. The reduced palette, meditative rhythms, and spatial clarity that characterize her work reflect the depth of these transcultural encounters and the broadening of her perspective that they have brought about.
