Where is Gabriela Trzebinski, and has she taken up the brush again? As a collector of her piquant paintings, and as someone who only wants more, this is an urgent question. I encountered the work of this young, new artist in London about eighteen months ago, at the London Contemporary Art Fair. I can remember passing by the Rebecca Hossack Gallery booth (which I had every intention to dodge since they do not tend to exhibit the type of naturalistic realism I normally collect) but there I saw a number of paintings of such originality, powerful narrative works with such a fresh and unusual viewpoint, that I decided to give them a closer look.

The artist was Gabriela Trzebinski. Her oils on canvas were both great and small and the range in their dimensions was matched by the expressive range of her subject matter. At first glance her work may appear primitive, feminine and even childlike. Blissful, brightly colored, simplified renderings of a caged canary and fantasy figures of blonde mermaids in catwalk hairdos, may falsely lead one to expect visual pablum. But a second glance will reveal the saccharine sweet mermaids are just an arm's length from a fisherman's nasty hook. Reality rips right through her canvases.

The juxtaposition of her naïve, stylized technique with often brutal subject matter lends an ironic, sometimes sardonic edge to her narratives. Some pictures are as light and gay as cotton candy, yet others depicted ostensibly stark misery. Her figures are almost exclusively black Africans in third-world settings. Stripped down interiors; flip-flops for footwear, naked lightbulbs dangling from the ceiling. We could almost stop right here. It's already unusual to see black people and their ways of life depicted in paintings, but with Trzebinski, black subjects are depicted with a deep intimacy, and in a context in which race relations, as normally experienced by Westerners in the media and the arts, are totally irrelevant. In Trzebinzski's oeuvre, no reference to oppression of the white world is necessary because more elemental, eternal and universal natural forces set the drama in motion.

Two small pictures immediately caught my attention and I tortured myself for hours trying to decide whether to purchase them. One, entitled "Jolly Successful Dinner Party" depicted a group of black people chatting delightfully at table. No poverty. No politics. Just a charming and delightful scene made all the more disarming by the figures' self-absorption and apparent self-satisfaction. Then on another small canvas not far away was a terrifying, yet witty vision of a bloody death, called "Croc Eating Someone's Husband." Seen from the water and looking towards land, an African man is devoured by a crocodile, while his wife, on shore, looks on in a red polka-dot dress. But the horrific scene is tempered by a calm, even blissful expression on the victim's face, by the comic depiction of the crocodile, bringing much to mind the serpent in the opening scene of Mozart's "Magic Flute," supposedly scary, but deep down merely risible. And then there are those polka-dots, or are they actually little red Valentine hearts on the poor wife (and soon-to-be widow's) dress? She, too, seems resigned to her plight. Oddly, she just stands there. Is that the way to react when a crocodile has your husband down his throat up to the collarbone? Finally, think about the title. Although the hapless victim is front and center on the canvas, it is captioned "Croc Eating Someone's Husband", not "Man Eaten by Croc as Wife Looks On." Sympathy is placed with the wife, which lends a bit of a feminist twist.

Gabriela Trzebinski's narrative paintings are not merely storytelling. Taken as a whole they are literary. I learned Rebecca was born in Kenya, had traveled extensively, attended art school briefly in England (in 1987 at Southampton College of Art and 1988 at the Byam Shaw School of Art, London) but considers herself self-taught. She has had one-woman shows in Africa, Europe and Australia. She has met Nelson Madela. She has known deep personal tragedy. Something in this unusual background has produced a unique outlook on life and influence on her art.

The work was original, fresh and gripping, but I had seen over a thousand images that day at the art fair, and I'd never heard of Trzebinski before, so I decided to sleep on it.

Gabriela Trzebinski Another Jolly Successful Dinner Party 2003
oil on canvas, 9½ x 11 inches

Six months later, I still had those images vividly emblazoned on my memory, and I could not rest until I called up Hossack to see if they were still available. They weren't, and I was quite frustrated. Out of the thousands of images I'd seen since the London art fair, these were speaking louder than any others. I returned to London in June, and visited Hossack's gallery on Windmill Street. There I was shown six or eight small pictures still available. I chose the very intense "The End of Mohamed" in which ten African men struggle to survive a sinking boat, but one of them is eaten by a shark. Presumably, he is Mohamed. There's plenty of scarlet blood but again, no panic among Mohamed's friends and/or family. I distributed an electronic image of the piece to a group of friends by email at it caused quite an uproar. No one had nothing to say about it. ("Is this an allusion to the end of Islam?" I was asked. "No, it is just a guy having a bad day." I countered.) The response was so strong, and I was so pleased having acquired it that I proposed to commission a second version of the crocodile picture, and later another "Jolly Successful Dinner Party," so as not to give a false impression that Gabriela dwells only on sensationalistic, bloody scenes. What a blessing that Gabriela kindly produced a second version of each painting for me, precisely as requested, capturing the essence of the previous version without being carbon copies, calling them "Croc Eating Someone's Husband, II" and "Another Jolly Successful Dinner Party." This she did, apparently with pleasure and also promptly which was also quite gratifying.

Gabriela Trzebinski The End of Mohamed 2001
oil on canvas, 9½ x 11 inches

Something in Gabriela's style reminds me of the great American painter, Horace Pippin, who developed his own personal, stylized, outsider approach to narrative work. The hallmark of Pippin is to depict life as it occurred, with an unvarnished, naked truthfulness. But Horace Pippin's world is gentler than Trzebinski's. His oeuvre abounds in tranquil scenes of domesticity, rarely if ever overtaken by high drama. Then I can make a reference to the work of Sarah McEneaney, also critiqued in these pages. Sarah's style also adopts an "outsider" esthetic, and she faithfully, movingly chronicles every aspect of her own personal life from the dramatic to the mundane. Trzebinski does not come to realism by strictly chronicling life. Her world is mythic and whimsical as well as empirically observed. She is a once sweet and raw; comic and terrifying. Triumph, routine and tragedy are all part of the same game in Trzebinski's world.

The extremes of emotion she depicts stretch to opposite poles of delight and terror, so that on balance one is left with a sense of balance and inevitability. Horror may be experienced by the viewer, but her characters seem to accept life's most deadly calamities. They have adapted to this world of mayhem. There is never any whining or self-pity. To the African villager, isn't an attack by a tiger, which they accept with equanimity, metaphorically their own World Trade Center disaster? In comparison, how well adapted to life are we?

Gabriela Trzebinski is uniquely gifted. Yet where is she? Hossack confided Trzebinski has undergone some deep personal losses recently, and suffering from an incapacitating depression, had vowed to give up painting. That was six months ago, when I was told all she would attempt to paint at the time were my recent commissions. Hossack put me on the phone to Trzebinski's answering machine, and I left a long message to thank her profusely for delivering my awesome paintings and give her a little pep talk. Now I find Rebecca has just concluded a second one-woman show at the Jan Murphy Gallery in Brisbane, Australia, so I can only hope she is springing back. In the meantime I will continue to be fascinated by her gift of finding the whimsy and pathos in a deadly shark or crocodile attack, as well as in a charming, "successful" dinner party. After all, at the end of the day aren't they all about eating?

other articles by Gregory J. Peterson at artcritical:
Richard Estes
Damon Lehrer
Sarah McEneaney
Sonya Sklaroff
Paul Hodgson

Gregory J. Peterson is a New York corporate lawyer who collects and lectures about contemporary realist painting. View his collection at www.petersoncollection.org