Lars Breuer | To the Happy Few
21 March – 13 April 2019
Exhibition Opening
Thursday 21 March
6-8 PM
MARS GALLERY, 7 James Street Windsor
Coinciding with the unveiling of a public art installation by the artist across MARS Gallery’s ten metre high, east facing external wall, proudly supported by the City of Stonnington.
MARS gallery presents Lars Breuer’s first solo exhibition in Australia. His work is based on minimalistic tendencies of the 20th century, with conceptual references to art history and literature. Often working with a self-designed grid-like italic typography, text and slogans appear like icons in their own right. This rhythmic and dynamic composition changes between its semantics of the words and its quality as an abstract pattern.
‘For me it is not a contradiction to combine futurism and its dynamics with neoclassical tendencies…I am interested in a combination of different elements. Friction and energy can be produced by the combination of text-based paintings with abstract patterns and compositions’.
– Lars Breuer
Breuer’s work is site specific, the starting point for construction of his wall paintings is always the surrounding architecture. In doing so the artist is always working with space, which becomes modified and clearly defined by his large-scale interpretations.
‘Paintings are placed in interaction with the environment. Art looses its quality if it is not connected with the space. Art wins in cooperation with the space. The total should always be more than a sum of its parts.’
– Lars Breuer
Accompanying the typographical solutions is Lars Breuer’s abstract and colourful compositions on canvas. Expressive forms face abstract constructions or hard-edged elements. Thereby the complex references with different facets are always combined to a general and coherent total.
Lars Breuer was born in Aachen, Germany in 1974 and lives and works in Cologne and Düsseldorf. He studied art history, philosophy and fine arts in Münster and Düsseldorf. From 2004 to 2010 he was a founding member of the exhibition space Konsortium.
Breuer was an awardee of the international artist & curator’s program, New York (iscp) and of the Wschodnia Residency in Lódz, Poland. His work is represented in several public collections like in the Museum Folkwang Essen, Audi AG (Ingolstadt), collection of the state North Rhine-Westphalia and in the Justin Art House Museum (Melbourne).
Lars Breuer has had solo exhibitions in the Ludwig Forum Aachen, Kunstverein Paderborn, Audi Kunstraum, Ingolstadt, as well as in the Temporary Gallery Cologne and in galleries in Munich, Copenhagen and Düsseldorf. Furthermore his work has been shown in the Museum fur Konkrete Kunst, Ingolstadt; The House of Arts, Ceské Budêjovice, Room East Gallery, New York and at the Kaunas Biennale.
