Judith Trepp
Judith Trepp (b. 1941, New York City) studied at Bard College before relocating to Zürich in 1970, where she continues to live and work. Soon after her arrival, she founded Quilts Unlimited, a textile atelier and production center dedicated to both traditional quilting practices and her own contemporary designs. Trepp often acknowledges these formative years in textile and color design as an essential, rigorous training ground—one that sharpened her sensitivity to chromatic nuance and established the foundation for her later painterly vocabulary.
In 1987 she participated in COLLARCH, an interdisciplinary program organized by the Painter and Plasterers Union in Zürich for architects and house painters. This encounter with the built environment and its trades led directly to her first solo exhibition and a major commission for large-scale wall paintings for a residential complex in Hasliberg, Switzerland. Subsequent commissions for organizational and institutional spaces expanded her engagement with architectural contexts.
Since 1989 Trepp has exhibited extensively in Switzerland, England, and the United States, including a solo exhibition at the Provincetown Art Association and Museum (PAAM) in 2010. Her work has been presented at numerous international art fairs—among them Art Chicago, Art Miami, the London Art Fair, and KIAF Seoul—and is represented in private and public collections across Switzerland, Italy, the United Kingdom, and the United States.
Trepp describes her approach as one that “thinks walls,” a sensibility that informs her paintings in oil, egg tempera, or pigment with tempera on linen. She also produces works on handmade Indian paper using acrylic or Japanese ink, and creates sculptural pieces in brushed stainless steel with car varnish. Her visual language is characterized by a minimalistic yet emotive intensity, grounded in intuition and a deliberate pursuit of what she terms “active stillness.”
An avid traveler, Trepp has spent extended periods in India and Japan, as well as in various regions of Asia, Europe, and the United States. These experiences have profoundly shaped her artistic outlook, infusing her practice with a broadened cultural and philosophical perspective. The distilled palette, contemplative rhythms, and spatial clarity that define her work reflect the depth of these cross-cultural engagements and the expansiveness of vision they have afforded.
