Mala Breuer

Mala Breuer was an American Abstract Expressionist. Her work is in the collections of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Albright Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo, and the Museum of Fine Arts, Santa Fe, New Mexico.

Born in Oakland, California, Mala Breuer grew up attending courses in painting and drawing at the California College of Arts and Crafts. Upon graduating from high school she was accepted to the, now, San Francisco Art Institute with a scholarship. There, she studied under many notable artists and faculty members, including Richard Diebenkorn, Clyfford Still, David Park, and Mark Rothko. Breuer matured as an artist in the era of Abstract Expressionism, a movement known for its focus on material and application, rather than representation. She recalls a split between realists and abstractionists in the student body at San Francisco Art Institute. “A student really had to make the choice,” Breuer explained. “I was a beginning student, but by the second or third semester I made a strong decision that it was abstract painting that I wanted to do. From the beginning it felt less materialistic and more spiritual.” During her second year Clyfford Still offered her a small studio space at the school.

By the late 1960s, Breuer was pouring water thinned washes of brightly colored acrylic paint onto large, wet, stretched, vertical canvases in her Bay Area studio. During a 1974 exhibition of those works at Zara Gallery in San Francisco, local gallerist Hank Baum suggested that she head to New York, where Abstract Expressionism, Minimalism, and Conceptual Art were continuing to gain traction. Breuer listened to this advice and set out to New York soon after with intentions of staying only one year, she stayed for eight.

Upon settling in New York in 1976, she rented a studio space from Julian Schnabel. Her quiet studio routine was often interrupted by Julian Schnabel smashing ceramic plates for his, now, famous “plate paintings”. It was in that studio that she began working with a palette knife, making direct, abstract marks with dark color, weight, and density in continuous patterned bands across the canvas. During her time in New York she regularly participated in solo and group exhibitions at various galleries, including James Yu, Davis and Long Co., Salander/O’Reilly, SoHo Center for Visual Artists, Hadler Rodriguez, and Craig Cornelius.

Breuer relocated to New Mexico in 1984. The southwest landscape influenced her use of color, light, and Minimalist aesthetics. While her compositional strategy of placing marks within vertical bands remained consistent, her palette of pale colored brushstrokes of paint and beeswax sparingly spread across white or off-white grounds became standard in her work for the rest of her career. Breuer completed countless watercolors and works paper throughout her practice, each one preceded every large work on canvas. Through watercolor, Breuer could quickly work out her color palette, use of pattern, and composition before translating it to larger scale. In the last decade of her painting practice she was recognized with awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, SITE Santa Fe, and the Pollock-Krasner Foundation. Breuer lived in New Mexico where she painted for over thirty years then retired from her studio.