PRESSRELEASE

Frank Breuer

Tunnels, Trailers, etc.

February 4 – April 16, 2011

Right away, the title of this show provides the first reference to some of the motifs photographer Frank Breuer is known for. As a collector and archivist of everyday structures, Breuer has garnered them on his journeys through various European countries and the United States. Works such as Trailers, Poles, Buildings, and Details each form their own independent groups of series.

Breuer has deliberately placed his motifs directly at the center of his images; this shifts the focus to the sculptural qualities of the objects, leaving comparatively little room for references that would identify the site and make it easier to place the motifs in a historical context, or any other context, for that matter. The locations of these buildings, trailer trucks, and electricity poles could be described as “non-places”: they remain almost totally unspecific, while, at the same time, they are given a measure of uniqueness — and thus, a kind of identity — which turns them into individual objects amid a mass of similar ones. They draw the observer’s attention, very naturally inviting comparisons. Differences and common traits can be discovered, while seemingly insignificant points of reference may also allow the viewer to contextualize the objects in time and space.

All three series on display unite the artist’s interests in urban structures erected to serve the stream of commodities and energy that forms the backbone of our global economic network.

Therefore, Breuer’s video of his trips through various automobile tunnels, being shown for the first time here, might also belong in this context; the tunnels are a kind of “subterranean network,” as the artist says, in which the vehicles and the people in them are — like electrons moving through an electricity cable, or goods being transported in trucks and then stored in warehouses — continually moving from one place to the next, the inevitable components of a global network.

Frank Breuer lives and works in Cologne.