Judith Trepp
Judith Trepp was born in 1941 in New York City, USA, within the intellectual and artistic milieu of the city. With her parents, a documentary filmmaker and an artist, she summered in the artist colony of Provincetown, MA. Later, as an adult, she maintained a summer atelier there from 1982 to 2018. Trepp graduated from Bard College, USA, where she was expelled from the art department for artistic insubordination and from the English department for intellectual insubordination; her degree is in history. As an adult, Trepp became a designer and artist and also wrote art criticism for the New York Times, ArtNews, and other publications.
After graduating from college, she worked in documentary films at ABC, CBS, and the United Nations Film Department as an associate producer. Arriving in Zürich in 1970 with no knowledge of German, Trepp first created a business designing and producing leather bags, belts, and sandals for major stores and boutiques. In 1973, she began a new business designing and producing home furnishings in fabric, selling these to interior decorators and decorating shops throughout Switzerland, Germany, France, and the USA until 1986. A single mother and the primary financial supporter, she painted at night. Designing with very delicate hues and tones in material, Trepp says, was the best art school she could ever have imagined.
Interested in making art for public and institutional spaces, Trepp participated in Collarch, an interdisciplinary course for architects and house painters at the Painter and Plasters Union in Zürich. From this experience came her first solo show and her first commission: large indoor wall paintings for an apartment complex in Hasliberg. Judith Trepp has continued to create wall paintings for both interior and exterior spaces.
Trepp says that she “thinks walls” when creating her paintings on linen with oil, egg tempera, or tempera and pigment. She also works on handmade Indian paper with acrylic or Japanese ink and in sculpture with brushed stainless steel with auto lacquer.
She has worked over long periods with numerous galleries in Switzerland, the USA, and London. In 2010, she had a solo show at the Provincetown Art Association and Museum (PAAM). Judith Trepp has participated in international art fairs such as KIAF Seoul, Art Chicago, London Art Fair, Art Miami, and Art Cologne. She has been the recipient of a Visarte residency at La Cité Internationale des Arts in Paris, as well as an artist residency in Spain. An upcoming project includes a one-month art residency in Kyoto.
Judith Trepp’s work is minimalistic but emotional and intuitive. She embraces the idea of active stillness in her paintings and drawings. To further this, Trepp employs a very reduced palette. She has traveled extensively in various parts of Asia, Europe, and the USA, spending significant time in India and Japan. These diverse intellectual and cultural experiences resonate in Trepp’s work.
