Selina Trieff

When Selina Trieff began painting during the 1950s in New York, she studied with Hans Hofmann, Willem de Kooning, Mark Rothko, and Ad Reinhardt at the Art Students League and Brooklyn College. Although she became known for her representational work, Trieff still considers herself an abstract painter, concerned primarily with composition, form, shape, and color. Her subjects generally fall into two categories—human and animal—and reflect two moods: “The animals I paint, the chickens, for instance, are funny, they are goofy. . . .The sadness of being comes into the figure paintings,” she has said. The human figures in Trieff’s works represent mankind at large, or what she refers to as “archetypal pilgrims wandering.”