ART
Robert Breer |
Written 30 January |
Thursday 25 November, 10:00gb agency, 75013 [map]Robert Breer
gb agency presents a new exhibition by Robert Breer. A new sculpture made in 2010 as well as lesser known earlier works by the artist will form part of the exhibition.
This exhibition examines the relationship between Breer’s painting and his earliest films in the context of the gripping post-war period, when certain artists had the courage to break with the aesthetic and political rules of the day to assert their diverse ideas. Neo-plasticism was an idealistic art: order and stability were crucial after the trauma of World War I, and art played a fundamental role in reconstructing Western civilization. In 1952 in Paris, Robert Breer was showing at the Denise René gallery and joined the Concrete art (geometric abstraction) movement—an alternative to Social Realism and Art Informel.
Yet quickly, Breer thought the group too authoritarian: ‘In that neo-plastic period, one made ‘Absolute’ paintings. It was ‘art concret’. So I made about one ‘absolute’ painting every week, and it occurred to me that there was a contradiction in being able to make so many absolutes. So I thought that maybe the interest was, for me, in arriving at the absolute rather than being there. So I thought maybe the process was more interesting than the product. By 1955 I continued to paint and I began to introduce elements in the paintings which broke with the neo-plastic orthodoxy, because usually what we were working with then were forms which were locked to one another and it was some sort of religious heresy to have a form which floated free. It was considered a weakness in a painting if there was any suggestion of elastic space. Usually, the space had to be very concrete, very tied down to the frame, tied one to another and so forth. In my case, I introduced a floating line, quite deliberately.’
It was at the same time that Breer began to make flip books, analyzing his pictorial compositions—’Untitled’ (1950). The technique—image by image—allowed the artist to imagine a shift from painting to film.
In 1952, Breer made his first film ‘Form Phase I’. The exhibition will show the four films in the series ‘Form Phase’ (1952-54).
Nearly thirty years later Breer’s film ‘70’ poetically evokes the same simplicity of forms. Drawings from the film will be shown in the exhibition. The grain of the drawing and the framing of the scenes recall the artist’s experience in Japan at the 1970 Osaka Universal Exposition.
Breer has always explored the ground underneath and the connection of his floating objects to the dynamic surface. Now for the first time he is shifting his focus of attention with his new piece ‘Clouds’ (2010), which attests to the artist’s originality and inventiveness. Sculptures travel slowly in unison across the ceiling, like clouds blowing in the wind. The movement becomes space and volume as it tracks or counters the circulation of the viewer, creating a new experience.
| What: | Robert Breer |
| When: | Thursday 25 November, 10:00 |
| Where: | gb agency, 20, rue Louise Weiss 75013 [map] |
| Transport: | Chevaleret, Bibliothèque François Mitterrand |
| Cost: | 0EUR |
| Phone: | +33 (0)1 5379 0713 |
| Email: | gbagency@club-internet.fr |
| Web: | www.gbagency.fr |
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