SELINA TRIEFF

Selina Trieff, age 81, passed away peacefully in her Wellfleet MA studio. She studied painting with, among others, Hans Hoffman, Marc Rothko, Ad Reinhardt and Morris Kantor, and exhibited at the Berta Walker Gallery in Provincetown MA and many other galleries in the US and Europe. She was a pioneering artist who inspired generations of others with her unique and powerful images and her tenacity and generosity. Her work is in many public and private collections. She will be missed by her husband Robert Henry, her daughters Sarah Henry and Jane Henry, their husbands Michael Gorin and Tobin Harshaw, grandchildren Emma and Molly Gorin and Truitt and Etta Harshaw, as well as countless friends, students and colleagues. Gifts in her memory can be made to the Provincetown Art Association. Memorial services in both New York and Provincetown will be  scheduled for later this year.

Published in The New York Times on Jan. 16, 2015

Selina was the guest artist for the WCSU MFA Visiting Artist Series on many occasions.

 

 

Three Graces - 2005

From the Berta Walker Gallery, Berta Walker, President & Curator: Called "an American original" by New York Times art critic John Russell, Trieff's somewhat autobiographical classical gold-leaf and oil portraits of human figures read paradoxically like characters on a modern stage wherein the artist, the painted archetypical figures ("neither male nor female...(but rather) the face of the soul") and the viewer, are engaged in a riveting dialogue. For Trieff, her animal subjects (pigs, chickens, sheep, goats, her dog Louie) are both "hilariously funny and at the same time very sad, and reflect symbolically the human condition, "like my dog Louie, my alter ego. Re-creating the spirit of animals...has allowed for a kind of explosion of paint," she adds. Trieff's exquisite drawing ability shines through in these fantastic portraits. Whether of human or animal, Trieff's portraits are allegories for our time, or any other. Said art historian and art critic Eileen Kennedy: "If Shakespeare had had a sister, she would probably have been Selina Trieff."