How can I buy a work by Mario Trejo?

Bruno David Gallery handles the sale of available works by Mario Trejo. For prices and availability, email info@brunodavidgallery.com or call +1 314 696 2377.

Where can I see work by Mario Trejo in person?

At Bruno David Gallery, 7513 Forsyth Boulevard, Saint Louis, Missouri 63105, during public hours or by appointment. His work is also in the collections of City of Seattle Portable Works Collection.

What does Mario Trejo make?

Paintings on wood panel built from hundreds of thousands of small hand-drawn marks, mostly irregular circles in archival ink, combined with enamel, acrylic, gesso, pencil and, in recent works, clay or phosphorus paint, as in Two Spirits (2018) and Illuminated Idiosyncratic Manifestations IV (2020).

Where is Mario Trejo based?

Mario Trejo lives and works in Seattle, Washington.

Has Mario Trejo had an exhibition at Bruno David Gallery?

Yes. Within (April 2023); Idiosyncratic Tantrums (10 March to 22 April 2023) are among his exhibitions at the gallery. Catalogues can be read in the gallery’s Publications library at brunodavidgallery.com/publications.

Mario Trejo

Mario Trejo (born 1979) is a Seattle-based painter who builds dense compositions from hundreds of thousands of small, quickly drawn marks, most often irregular circles in archival ink. Seen up close, the fields read as chaotic; from a distance they resolve into ordered forms that can suggest both cosmic and microscopic matter. Trejo was born and raised in St. Louis.

He works on wood panel, combining archival ink with enamel, acrylic, gesso and pencil, and in some recent works clay or phosphorus paint. In his earlier work he often limited his palette to black and white; the small works shown as Catharsis in 2009 were made by scratching into a black field of acrylic and ink. Trejo describes each hand-drawn circle as an imperfect attempt at a perfect form, and the accumulated marks as a record of repeated physical effort, tied to ideas of time, space, number and eternity. He has called the work a metaphor for “the fragile imperium under which we all reside.”

Trejo received a BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2005 and an MFA from the San Francisco Art Institute in 2008.

Trejo’s work was included in New American Paintings No. 83 (Midwest edition, 2009). He has had solo exhibitions at the Elmhurst Art Museum in Illinois (2012), Herringer Kiss Gallery in Calgary, Koki Arts in Tokyo, which showed Eternity in 2013, and K. Imperial Fine Art in San Francisco, which presented Sentients in 2018. Koki Arts has also shown his work at the Seattle Art Fair. His painting Machine is in the City of Seattle’s collection, as part of the Seattle Public Utilities 1% for Art Portable Works Collection.

Trejo has shown with Bruno David Gallery since 2009, when the gallery presented Catharsis in its Front Room, with an accompanying catalogue. Centered followed in the Front Room in 2011, and his CV lists further solo exhibitions at the gallery in 2013 (Projected Edifices) and 2014 (Overview). In 2023 the gallery presented Idiosyncratic Tantrums (10 March – 22 April 2023), also documented in a catalogue, followed by Within, shown in the gallery’s Window on Forsyth vitrine in Clayton.

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