Robert Breer: Time Flies

Overview

Best known for his films and experimental animations, Robert Breer began his career as a painter and was one of the early members of the postwar Parisian school of abstraction, using Piet Mondrian’s vision of an ideal pure form of abstract art with strict rules of composition as well as Mondrian’s Neo-Plasticism, an austere and geometric concrete art. In the early 1950s Breer shifted this interest in geometric abstraction into film and created his first group of films Form Phases (1954-1956), which explore movement, composition and space, almost animating his paintings and creating complex forms. These experimental films used a range of techniques from animating geometric shapes and drawings, to using collage and film clippings.

'My own approach to film is that of a painter- that is, I try to present the total image right away, and the images following are merely other aspects of and equivalent to the first and final image. ' (1)

This exhibition reveals Breer’s playfulness through a wide range of media, humour also translates into his kinetic sculptures and studies, for example a sketch for a moving conference building or a town where everything moves around you. The various objects move very slowly and subtly so that when you look back nothing is where it started. Using satire and metamechanics as did Jean Tinguley with his Dada kinetic sculptures, Breer created different amusing objects that move around you, like a wall, a 'porcupine' or a 'rug'.

In 1966 he created small self-propelled dome shape sculptures which later served as models for the group of 6ft high sculptures sent to Expo ’70 in Osaka as part of the EAT (Experiments in Art and Technology) project for Pepsi Co. Inc.
For this exhibition in Sharjah we have commissioned and recreated two of these large Floats that can be seen outside The Flying Saucer.


(1)Interview with Breer by Guy L. Coe – Film Culture- 1962.