Marco Breuer

These intimate works, produced over the past 12 years, illustrate Breuer's practice of subjecting photographic paper to a range of erosive treatments. By folding, scoring, burning, scouring, abrading, or striking the paper, Breuer coaxes a vivid range of colours and textures from his material. Scarred and lacerated, the works become alloys of light and physical contact, records of their own coming-into-being. Throughout his 20-year career, Marco Breuer has become well known for consistently challenging conventional notions of image making. Art critic Vince Aletti has described Breuer's work as having "the intelligence and wit of the mid-century modernist avant-garde and the anything-goes audacity of photography's earliest innovators". Operating at the intersection of photography and drawing, Breuer deliberately misuses both his tools and materials. His unorthodox drawing implements have included shot guns, modified record players, hot plates, and the guts of electric frying pans. The results of his investigations are abstract, complex, one-of-a-kind images that negotiate the illusionistic space of photography versus the concrete space of the physical mark.