Ann Toebbe turns interiors into places with memory
In Chicago, Ann Toebbe paints skewed interiors and cropped buildings that carry emotion as much as architecture. Her work is included in a group show at Andrew Rafacz through October 31.
Ann Toebbe’s paintings are not just depictions of rooms, houses, or facades. Working from lived experience and feeling, the Chicago artist builds images in which architecture becomes a container for memory and mood.
Her process begins with sketches and more developed drawings before the final work is built on panel with gouache, oil, paper collage, and colored pencil. Reference photos are part of the process, but she alters the layout, stretches walls, opens interiors to the outdoors, and folds space into forms that feel constructed rather than simply observed.
What matters most is the way the space is made to behave. Reverse and parallel perspective, along with shifted lines and a strong attention to pattern and texture, gives her interiors an uncanny tilt, so that familiar domestic settings start to feel slightly unstable and newly charged.
For artists and anyone interested in painting or drawing, Toebbe’s work is a clear example of how observation can become invention. The room is not treated as backdrop; it becomes a formal puzzle, where structure, surface, and lived experience are all visible at once.
Source : Colossal