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Mala Breuer Early Works 1970 - 1980 May 2 through May 31 Opening reception with the artist May 2, Friday 5:00 - 7:00 |
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M ala Breuer grew up drawing and painting. Art became more viable, more real for her when she began attending classes at age 12, at the California College of Arts and Crafts-still one of the largest and most respected colleges of art in the Western United States. After graduating from high school, the young painter attended the San Francisco Art Institute where she studied under Richard Diebenkorn and Clyfford Still, among others; Still gave his student a small studio space at the school in which to paint. In the summer of 1947, Breuer took a painting class with Mark Rothko. It is no coincidence that this artist developed a deep and abiding concern for what she has called "the nonobjective which fulfilled a spiritual expression released through my artwork." Breuer matured as an artist in, and was profoundly affected by, the era of Abstract Expressionist painting.
By the late 60s and into the early 70s, Breuer was pouring water-thinned washes of acrylic paint onto large, wet, stretched canvases, a la Helen Frankenthaler and the Stain Painters. During an exhibition of these vertically formatted paintings, a gallerist in San Francisco suggested that Breuer head to New York. She did, intending to spend a year there absorbing the art scene: she stayed for eight years, briefly working in a studio in the anterior portion of Julian Schnabel's loft in the late 70s. It was here that her paintings became more subtle in color and more open in the application of pigment. As she continued working on vertical canvases that reached six feet in height, Breuer corresponded occasionally with her former teacher Clyfford Still. During a visit to her studio in 1978, Still said that he liked her paintings, noting "the color subtlety with which only a woman can paint." According to Breuer's journal of the event, Still claimed that her work was "stronger than hard-edge painting." He also admired her "sweep of color."
By now Breuer was showing in SoHo and gaining recognition as a significant painter. It is this fertile time in a long career as a lifelong painter of abstract works that is to be featured in her exhibition at Charlotte Jackson Fine Art. Some 10 six-foot vertical paintings will be shown, paintings that reflect the artist's ongoing sensitivity to "color, the movement of color, and how color affects color."
Breuer moved to New Mexico in 1984, where she has "painted quietly" ever since. She exhibited with Laura Carpenter and James Kelly, and at the Center for Contemporary Arts and SITE Santa Fe; beginning her career with Charlotte Jackson in 1994 with the exhibition Three Women-Agnes Martin, Mala Breuer, Florence Pierce. Breuer's art is in private collections nationally and in Korea.
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