1962–present
Gabriela Trzebinski
Gabriela Trzebinski was born in Nairobi in 1962, studied in Southampton and London, and later lived and worked in Houston. Her paintings and short Super 8 films return to scenes from television news and to memories of a Kenyan childhood. Her exhibitions include solo shows in London (2000) and New York (2006) and group shows in Houston.
Biography
In 1989 the Kenyan authorities built a pyre in Nairobi National Park from confiscated hunting trophies and animal hides. It was a protest against poaching; shortly before, the ivory of more than two thousand elephants had been burned at the same site. Two decades later, in February 2009, Gabriela Trzebinski showed at the Houston art space Box 13 a newly re-edited Super 8 film, “The Burning of Hides”.
She was born in Nairobi in 1962, into a family of the British writer Errol Trzebinski and the Polish architect Zbigniew Trzebinski, known as Sbish. Besides her there were two sons in the family, Bruce and Tonio. From early childhood she was occupied with questions of cross-cultural encounter, race and gender, and later she described herself as an African artist of European heritage.
She went to England to study: Southampton College of Art in Hampshire in 1987, and the Byam Shaw School of Art in London in 1988.
By 1995 Trzebinski was working both as a painter and as a designer. In 2000 she had a solo exhibition at the Rebecca Hossack Gallery in London, and that same year the gallery presented her at artLondon. In 2003 the Portobello Film Festival in London showed her ten-minute digitised Super 8 film “My Beautiful Violetta”, on which she shared the work, music included, with the London musician Sarah Sarhandi. A solo exhibition followed, “Gabriela Trzebinski: New Paintings and the ‘Matatu’ Project”, at the George Adams Gallery in New York (2006), along with a move to Houston, where she began to take part in local shows. In October 2006, at DiverseWorks in Houston, in the group exhibition “Run for Your Lives!”, she showed paintings in a deliberately primitive manner. In them disasters and wars appear as a viewer sees them on a television screen. On one canvas, ironically titled “Clijsters ruled out of US Open”, a scrolling news ticker runs along the bottom, above blood-spattered walls in a CNN frame showing the bombing of Beirut. Headlines and channel logos entered other subjects too: UN tanks in Rwanda, the disaster zone after Hurricane Katrina. A painting of 2006 shows the Lost Boys of Sudan looking out of an aeroplane’s windows: in 2000 these young refugees were brought to the United States.
In December 2007 the curator and artist Michael Guidry invited her and four other artists to the Lawndale Art Center for the show “Little Known Facts”. Participants recreated a corner of their studio, and Trzebinski covered the wall with newspaper cuttings, many of them about Africa, adding a few works. A reviewer saw in this an account of her African childhood and of life in the United States as a white African.
In spring 2008 she took part in “Slide Jam”, a monthly programme run by the education department of the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston. Around the same time her work was shown in the Houston Area Exhibition, held every four years at the Blaffer Gallery at the University of Houston. The imagery there is harsh, drawn from her experience of multicultural life in Africa: political oppression, sex, mutilation, death. The work “My Daddy Is a Tranny” turns to old Swahili customs of annual festivities and to the ambiguous dress of street performers on the Kenyan coast, in particular on the island of Lamu.
In 2008 the Aurora Picture Show in Houston, marking its tenth anniversary, named her among those it thanked at its annual fundraising dinner for their support and influence.
Profile notes