Marco Breuer

Artist lecture Thursday, April 21, 2016 7PM
Timken Lecture Hall, California College of the Arts, 1111 Eighth St., San Francisco, CA 94107
Untitled (C-1310), 2013

Throughout his career, Marco Breuer has consistently challenged conventional idea of photographic image making. He employs photographic techniques without relying on the use of a camera, aperture, or film, utilizing a combination of photogrammic, abrasive, and incisive ways of mark making to create images. Breuer’s photographic explorations include works with chromogenic paper, gelatin silver photograms, cyanotypes, gum bichromate prints, silkscreens, and traditional drawing paper. His abstractions result from a systemic investigation into photographic process. Physical interventions of the material—including folding, sanding, chewing, and heat—create latent images, unexpected colors, and grid-like marks on the surface emulsion. He also leverages unorthodox materials in his work, ranging from using ordinary household objects to firing a shotgun into a box of photographic paper. Breuer’s interrogation of process results in images that evoke a hybridity of photography and drawing. Breuer challenges the foundational notions of what constitutes a photograph, pushing against preconceived limits of the medium to discover new applications of photographic language.

Breuer was born in Landshut, Germany in 1966 and emigrated to New York in 1993. His work has widely exhibited throughout the United States and Europe, with recent solo exhibitions at the de Young Museum and Minneapolis Institute of Arts. He currently lives and works in upstate New York. Breuer is the inaugural recipient of the Larry Sultan Photography Award.


Larry Sultan Visiting Artist Program

Pier 24 Photography is pleased to present the Larry Sultan Visiting Artist Program in collaboration with California College of the Arts and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Each year, the Larry Sultan Visiting Artist Program brings six photographers, writers, and curators to San Francisco to offer free and open lectures, and to work one-on-one with students at California College of the Arts.


Larry Sultan Photography Award


Jonathan Calm, Double Vision (Recording I), 2018

Jonathan Calm

Fall 2019 Residency
Headlands Center for the Arts, Sausalito, CA

Click HERE for more information on the Larry Sultan Photography Award

Jonathan Calm is a visual artist who works in photography, video, installation, and performance. A central theme of his work is the relationship between photography and urban architecture, and the powerful role of images in the way architectural constructs shape the lives of individuals and communities.

In his most recent work, Calm explores the complex representation of African-American automobility from a historical and contemporary perspective, focusing and drawing on the importance and resonance of the Negro Motorist Green Book. Of this project, he explains, “the image of the infinite highway and the unbridled freedom to roam the land has always been considered a quintessential expression of the modern American spirit, but the black American experience of travel, which involves heightened subjectivity and exposure, has to this day proven a precarious privilege rather than an inalienable right.”

Calm’s art practice is international in scope and has been featured in numerous solo and group exhibitions, including Frequency at the Studio Museum in Harlem (2005); Role Play at the Tate Britain (2006); Black Is, Black Ain’t at the University of Chicago’s Renaissance Society (2008); Streetwise at the Reina Sophia Museum in Madrid (2008) and the Chelsea Art Museum (2011); deCordova Biennial at the deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum (2013); and Rooted Movements at LMAKprojects in New York City (2014). Calm currently lives in Palo Alto, CA where he is a faculty member in the Department of Art and Art History at Stanford University.