About

Jacob Trouba is a self-taught artist and professional athlete, whose practice explores gesture, immediacy, and identity through the physical act of painting. His path to art began with a visit to the studio of painter Michael Geschwer, which sparked an enduring curiosity about the language of mark-making. Guided by Geschwer’s mentorship and the teachings of figurative painter Ophrah Shemesh, Trouba came to understand painting as a linguistic and phenomenological act—each line, mark, and wash forming part of a pictorial vocabulary that conveys thought and emotion through movement.

Trouba’s visceral visual language is informed by critical lineages of instinctive mark-making. Studying the practices of canonized artists by the likes of Willem de Kooning, Cy Twombly, and Yves Klein, Trouba developed his own pictorial vocabulary that stewards an intimate relationship between his body, motion, and the canvas.

Trouba’s recent work embraces that physicality fully. Referencing Yves Klein’s Anthropometries, he uses his body, clad in hockey gear, as a dynamic brush. Each impact becomes both event and composition—a record of motion, identity, and contact. This ongoing series, Landing My Mark, transforms the language of sport into painterly syntax, merging two disciplines that have long defined his life. Through successive strikes to the canvas, Trouba constructs visceral fields of color and energy that investigate authorship, embodiment, and the immediacy of action.

Over the course of his career, Trouba has exhibited his work at Harper’s, New York, and his work can be found in notable private collections in the US and Europe, including the Morgan Stanley Collection (New York, USA) and Lebeau Collection (France).