Andrea Marie Breiling has emerged as one of the leading women in contemporary art, known for large scale abstract paintings. Most recently, she has garnered critical acclaim for her unique and groundbreaking use of spray paint on canvas, a practice which allows her to create richly layered paintings, steeped in bold color, emotion, and physicality. While her spray paint paintings have been the focus of her practice since 2019, her exciting and rare work here at auction, titled Gloves Off, was executed in 2018 just prior to the artist adopting spray paint as her primary medium. Gloves Off demonstrates Breiling’s expertise and physicality while using more traditional materials: bold gestures of vinyl paint, charcoal and oilstick saturate the canvas with lush textures of blues, burgundies, whites and yellows. Exhibited in the artist’s first solo show in Europe, the present work is a testament to the artist’s understanding and appreciation of color. To Breiling, painting is “about an orchestrated time to dance, to evolve, to transcend all of this energy in a very serious un-cyclical and non-lackadaisical way.”i
Akin to forebearer Helen Frankenthaler, Andrea Marie Breiling’s ties to the Abstract Expressionist movement surpass aesthetics and explore the representational qualities of the media. In a 1965 interview, Frankenthaler states: “I felt I could stretch more in the Pollock framework. I found that in Pollock I also responded to a certain Surreal element—the understated image that was really present: animals, thoughts, jungles, expressions. You could become a de Kooning disciple or satellite or mirror, but you could depart from Pollock.”ii Echoing Frankenthaler’s ambition to stand adjacent to the concept of Abstract Expressionism, Breiling sees this association as ultimately “unsatisfying” and that it left the artist “wishing that experiencing my paintings was more emotionally consuming, rather than a painting show about painting itself.”iii More significant to her practice is the “transcendental,” ephemeral quality of painting, a sentiment that is often understated in a male-dominated discourse.
Andrea Marie Breiling earned her MFA in Studio Art from Claremont Graduate University in 2014. Breiling’s work is in the permanent collection of the Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami, the X Museum, Beijing, among others.
