Marco Breuer: Col - Or

Isabelle Dervaux: Drawings curator at the Morgan Library & Museum, New York.Mary-Kay Lombino: Curator at the Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center, Vassar College.Jeffrey DeShell: A novelist and literary critic, DeShall is the author of five novels and is a currently a Professor of English, serving as the Director of the Creative Writing Program at the University of Colorado at Boulder.

This exceptional book presents a series of never-before-seen images by artist Marco Breuer. Collectively titled Col . or, these small, yet dynamic works are reproduced here at full scale, bringing the viewer close to the explosive marks and delicate lines that Breuer extracts from photographic colour material.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.