In Conversation with Ginny Casey and Fabian Treiber on unravelling the surreal in everyday life

In the heart of London, Cob Gallery is currently hosting two captivating exhibitions: Busywork by Ginny Casey and Bruised by Fabian Treiber. While both artists explore the abstract, their paintings bring extraordinary perspectives and techniques that pull the viewer into strange, surreal worlds.

Casey’s dreamlike compositions invite an encounter with the everyday objects that take on a life of their own, reflecting psychological depth through muted tones and anthropomorphic forms.

Meanwhile, Treiber’s fragmented, layered landscapes beckon the viewer into immersive spaces where human-like forms and elements create a quiet yet powerful dialogue.

Fabian Treiber’s Bruised challenges the boundaries of reality and abstraction, taking the viewer into a journey of fragmented realms that are daunting and intimate. When asked about his inspirations for this series, Treiber shared how personal experiences of surrealism and even the grotesque became integral to his work. For this exhibition, he brings disembodied hands and arms to his otherwise desolate landscapes, adding an eerie but still welcoming touch. “These fragmented forms act as silent guides,” Treiber explains, “tempting the viewer while remaining involved in something unspoken or intangible.” He refers to the process as tapping into the "Call of the Void." This is an intense instinctive pull toward what he didn't know has, for him, grown beyond being a pure artistic notion to almost a lived experience.

In Treiber’s world, tedious objects like a cigarette take on complex, undefined meanings, expanding the boundaries of an artwork’s narrative potential. These components evolve from a simple visual feature to a symbol of sensation, time, and memory, existing just beyond the visible. "These objects become proxies for the intangible," he explains, positioning the cigarette as an anchor that holds within it an entire range of subtle human emotions and sensations. Treiber’s interest in the ‘strange’ is clear; he constructs a stage, not a single narrative, allowing viewers to bring their interpretations into the pieces. His approach to displaying his art is equally intentional, where multiple paintings join to create a unified experience, leveraging the gallery space to blur the line between artwork and exhibition space. The placement of paintings, paired with the gallery's walls, subtly disturbs the viewer’s expectations, creating what Treiber calls “a productive misunderstanding.” It’s through this fragile tension that he hopes viewers will question their perspectives and feel a deeper understanding of reality.

Across the gallery, Ginny Casey’s exhibit called Busywork captures a distinctive yet definitive exploration of the surreal. Through her artwork, Casey elevates everyday items, injecting them with a curious ambiguity that invites viewers to see beyond the object’s physical form and its symbolic weight. She explains how her fascination with objects like mops arose from their mundane presence. Inspired by memories of restaurant jobs and even animated scenes from “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice”, Casey discovered an “emotional tether” in these items, drawing out metaphors of flooded basements and psychological depths. “I’m drawn to objects for their visual qualities and my everyday associations with them,” she says, emphasising that her interpretations shift with each new perspective, allowing her to welcome the ambiguity each viewer brings to the piece.

Much of Casey's work seems to vibrate with life as if its objects might at any moment twist and turn, entwine, and sway on the brink of movement. She does this by employing automatic drawing, borrowing from the drawing of her son, and even using a tracing table as a means to uncover unpredictable forms. The result is a world in which inanimate, real objects feel alive, fraught with 

quiet tension paralleling larger, often autobiographical themes. In her own words, she says, “In some of the recent work, I got into creating little conundrums where the objects are somewhat entrapped. That feeling of being constrained could be related to many things autobiographically or in the bigger picture of what has been going on in the world today.”

Colour and texture are also critical in Casey's works, creating a contrast that deepens the emotional landscape. In Busywork, she's leaning into reds, pinks, and browns, colours she finds both courageous and strong. In each painting, she balances fresh, unlayered areas with those heavily wrought in paint, a process she describes as a "delicate battle" that determines the painting's final mood. This tension of soft textures with unsettling forms calls on the viewers to sit in discomfort and make familiar connections with something that can be personal.

In Busywork, Casey emphasises that art allows her to say what words cannot, letting her subconscious lead the way. Her process oscillates between blind experimentation and controlled logic, creating scenes where, as she puts it, “a lumbering object threatening to overturn, a precarious pile, even a sharp edge of colour abutting a translucent section.” These stories resonate with larger narratives, bridging the gap between the surreal and the universal, where every viewer may find traces of their reality dug within the painting.

In both their exhibits, Ginny Casey and Fabian Treiber balance the surreal with a reflectively experimental approach. At the same time, Treiber's fragmented landscapes summon the viewer into the strangeness within, and Casey's playful yet tense objects thin the line between animate and inanimate. Each exhibition invites viewers to step beyond the visible, initiating an introspective journey throughout their abstractly constructed realms.