Robert Breer

Biography

After finishing his university studies, Robert Breer moved to France, where he produced, and first exhibited, large geometric paintings. In 1952, he began to experiment with film and flipbooks, which served as the basis for his first group of films, Form Phases (1954-1956). Having left painting behind, Breer shifted his style from abstract to eclectic in 1959, when he began working with mutoscopes and kinetic sculpture. Breer’s career spanned over 50 years, and he created more than 40 short films, in which he experimented with photographs, objects, colours and lines in a non-narrative structure.

Solo exhibitions of his work have been held in several international venues, such as the Contemporary Art Museum, St. Louis, USA (2012); Museum Tinguely, Basel, Switzerland (2011); Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art, Gateshead, UK (2011) and Musée national d'art moderne, Paris (2001).
His work has been shown in group exhibitions at Museum Kunstpalast, Düsseldorf (2016); Kiev Biennale, Ukraine (2015); Aspen Art Museum, USA (2015); Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (2015); The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York (2014); New Museum, New York (2012); Centre Pompidou, Musée national d’art moderne, Paris (2012) and the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, USA (2010-2012), among others.

Robert Breer's work is included in the permanent collections of the Centre Pompidou, Musée national d’art moderne, Paris; Fonds national d’art contemporain, Paris; Moderna Museet, Stockholm; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; The Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum, St. Louis; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; The Centro Galego de Arte Contemporanea, Santiago de Compostela, Spain; Musée Cantonal des Beaux-Arts, Lausanne and Middlesbrough Institute of Modern Art, UK, among others.
Breer was awarded the Stan Brakhage Vision Award at the 28th Denver Film Festival, Colorado, USA (2005); Maya Deren Independent Film and Video Artists' Award, presented by the American Film Institute (1987) and the Max Ernst Prize at the Oberhausen Film Festival, Germany (1969).

Robert Breer was born in Detroit, USA in 1926. He studied engineering at Stanford University before deciding to become an artist. From 1971 to 2001, he taught film at the Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art, an institution of higher education in New York. Breer died in Tucson in 2011.