ART CITIES:Brussels-Andrea Marie Breiling

Andrea Marie Breiling’s interest in creating colorful artworks goes back a long way. “My earliest memories of painting were as a young girl at my grandmother’s ‘preschool’. She gave each of us primary colors and we got to use our hands to make other colors, and watch the transformation happen on our skin. It was such a tactile experience, one I will never forget.” Originally working in oils, she has recently begun experimenting with dye and spray paint.

By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: Almine Rech Gallery Archive

In her solo exhibition “I Might’ve Inhaled You” Andrea Marie Breiling makes us witness to her physicality while simultaneously inviting us to experience our own. Building multiple, cross-hatched layers of spray paint, she brings phantasmagorical gestures and shapes to life across the surfaces of her work. Her brush-free approach allows her to render wide forms filled with a frenetic energy that is as emotional as it is physical, as seen in “Shifting Dunes” (2021) or “Under the Bridge (Downtown)” (2021). Breiling explains that her paintings are imbued with a spirit of optimism in the face of personal and global hardship. “These paintings beg for the return of miracles and hope. Not looking back at the dogma of life as we know it now—but to a brighter future full of endless possibilities. Each, for me, is a prayer”. These highly spontaneous yet masterful experiments unite her works in a complete understanding of color and spirit of discovery. Experiences of everyday life are shown physically, and her deft use of paint is an extension of this understanding. She is known for the complex nature of her practice, which includes painting, photography and performance. Operating in an extensive variety of media, from the traditional to the eccentric, Breiling has generated an oeuvre that, while extraordinarily distinct, is decisively embedded within a multifaceted and conclusive artistic approach. Through her painting style at the crossroad between several artistic influences, Andrea Marie Breiling has been building for several years now a work including different methods and means of painting, to raise a sense of awareness of the medium, which she aims to reinvent and to reshape, overgoing traditional hierarchies. Breiling’s work in a kind of historical expressionism in which the pictorial movement primes, leaving large areas empty or on the opposite a saturation of irregular lines, a collection of minor tads or of larger flat tints where the juxtaposition generates specific colour sensations. The works display a radical and free-use of color and line, as well as a self-confident testing with composition, scale and substantial structure. Each painting showcases Breiling’s developed artistic bravura that, over a period of several years, has grown into a unique personal language of color, line and form.

Photo: Andrea Marie Breiling, The Devil’s Fool (Detail), 2021, Acrylic and aerosol on canvas, 167 x 185 cm / 66 x 73 in, © Andrea Marie Breiling, Courtesy the artist and Almine Rech Gallery

Info: Almine Rech Gallery, Abdijstraat 20 Rue de l’Abbaye, Brussels, Duration: 11/3-10/4/2021, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 10:00-19:00, www.alminerech.com