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.