Michael Tarbi

Biography

Michael Tarbi was born in Pittsburgh in 1980 and studied at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts from 1998 to 2002, where he won the Angelo Pinto Award for Experimental Work and the J. Henry Schiedt Travel Scholarship. His first solo show, The Human Condition, opened at Thomas Robertello Gallery in Chicago in 2006.

For more than a decade Tarbi has painted doormats: small, exact paintings of an everyday object people step over without a second look. Made at a fraction of life size, they sit somewhere between painting and sculpture, and between abstraction and a faithful picture of a thing. Some carry words that argue with each other; others are closer to pure pattern. The series has been included in the Pierogi Flat Files and was the focus of a 2019 solo exhibition at mh PROJECT nyc. At Holland Tunnel Revisited, his doormats hung in The Dark Abyss of Time (2026).

His work has appeared at the Corcoran Gallery of Art, MASS MoCA, the Carnegie Museum of Art, the Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia and the Hyde Park Art Center, and in New American Paintings. He received a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship in 2011, as well as grants from the Rauschenberg Foundation's Change Inc., the Mayer Foundation and Artists' Fellowship Inc. He lives and works in the Hudson Valley.

Practice. Meticulous quarter-scale painted doormats that sit between painting and sculpture and between abstraction and representation, sometimes carrying contradictory text. Earlier series include cells, The Human Condition and Dead Landscapes.