Patsy Krebs Works | Bio | Press | Exhibition Views
American b. 1940
Lives and works in Inverness, California
The paintings of Patsy Krebs create an awareness of our perceptions of color, shading, and light. Her subtle, masterful pallets illuminate the closest gradations of light and dark values and their relationship to each other. Two of her central forms are the rectangle and square, both of which echo the shapes of her paintings and float in and out of vision, hovering in a tantalizing zone on the threshold of optical illusion. Even behind the most scientifically grounded optical phenomena and color theory, there lies a core of mystery and mood in these works.
A native of northern California, Patsy Krebs spent her formative years as an artist in New York. She later lived in Los Angeles, where she earned an MFA from Claremont College in 1976 and began an exhibiting career. She has taught extensively at art institutions throughout California, most recently at Dominican University, San Rafael.
In 1996 and 2010, Krebs was awarded a Pollack- Krasner Foundation Artist’s Grant. She was the subject of a 2018 solo exhibition at the Bolinas Museum, CA, and her works are included in the collections of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, CA; de Young Museum, San Francisco, CA; San Jose Museum of Art, CA; Berkeley Art Museum/Pacific Film Archive, CA; Norton Museum, West Palm Beach, FL; Denver Art Museum, CO; and the Brooklyn Museum, NY. Patsy Krebs: Painting, a monographic survey of her work, was published in 2017.