ANDREAS BREUNIG
Adaptability (PRO)
JANUARY 8 – FEBRUARY 5, 2022
Nino Mier Gallery is pleased to present Adaptability (PRO), our third solo show with German artist Andreas Breunig in Los Angeles.
Breunig analytically dissects his material. His painting consists of pre-, post- and reproductions of modernist image strategies. Residual painting. In distinct settings, he constantly puts calculated gestures, textures, velocities and varying degrees of dissolved representationalism to the test.
The pictorial spaces emerge from such experimental setups and are continually updated in the overall context. In doing so, Breunig follows a kind of call-and-response principle. In constant permutations, the painterly ‘codings’ and relations of the specific elements shift visibly.
Within larger series, smaller groups of works of about 4 to 8 paintings are singled out—then come evaluation and decision making. But nothing is “finally treated to the end,” the respective series and individual pictorial stances remain fragmented and are kept open. Fundamental questions instead of interpretative answers.
The pictorial elements are inconsistent and discontinuous but still equally placed or layered. This results in “compositions without composition,” in which categories such as “figuration” or “abstraction” no longer apply and are thus no longer appropriate.
Breunig moves between flat pictorial spaces and installative “spatial images.” Nonetheless, his painting always includes a focussed examination of the immaterial digitality. In face of post-natural, artificial light (displays, filters etc.), his chromatic scale ranges between a brisk and overdriven palette as well as a manifold and differentiated choice of color. Working with oil, acrylic, graphite and charcoal, instead of reduction, it’s all about the maximization of expressive possibilities.
Breunig employs the residual or anti-forms of modernist painting. Due to the simultaneity of such surface phenomena, the boundaries of painting / photography / print become just as blurred as the attributions of original / copy / reproduction. An explicit inquiry into the remaining conditions of pictoriality.
To accompany Andreas Breunig’s concurrent exhibitions in Los Angeles in Brussels, Nino Mier Gallery is happy to publish a lavishly designed and artist’s book-like publication—including rare archival material as well as an in-depth conversation between curator Hannah Eckstein, scholar Clemens Rathe and writer Marlene Alice Schenk.
Andreas Breunig was born in Eberbach, Odenwald in 1983, and lives in Düsseldorf, Germany. He attended the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf where he studied under Albert Oehlen. His recent institutional exhibitions, celebrating a new generation of German painters, included Kunsthaus NRW Aachen, Kunstmuseum Bonn, Kunstsammlungen Chemnitz, Kunstverein Heppenheim, Kunstverein Reutlingen and the Museum Wiesbaden. His work is included in important collections such as the Aïshti Foundation, Lebanon, and the Friedrichs Foundation, Germany.