Von Lintel Gallery is pleased to present Nature of the Pencil, a drawing installation by Marco Breuer, his fifth solo exhibition at Von Lintel Gallery.

Throughout his nearly twenty-year career, Breuer has approached his work as a systematic investigation of the conditions of the photographic medium and its relationship to related media. For Nature of the Pencil—a play on William Henry Fox Talbot’s seminal book The Pencil of Nature—Breuer examines and explores the intersection of photography and drawing.

A number of recent photogenic drawings by Breuer provide the starting point for this chalkboard installation. These photographic prints are interspersed with wall drawings, reworked images, and notes on photography and drawing, on mark-making in general, on perception, decay, and destruction. In Breuer’s work, line is the result of a physical interaction between materials and forces. Line and color are excavated through surface violations, throwing off the conventional figure–ground relationship.

The altered gallery, painted with a band of chalkboard black, refers to the photographic darkroom as well as the classroom. Employing a range of tools such as drywall snap lines, stencils, and pounce bags, Breuer uses chalk to add notations, measurements, diagrams, and marks. The improvisatory nature of the installation is intended to highlight Breuer’s relationship to the darkroom as a place where ideas and images are not merely executed, but generated and considered.

Marco Breuer has exhibited widely throughout the United States and Europe. His work is in numerous public collections, including the Museum of Modern Art, New York; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Metropolitan Museum of Art; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; Baltimore Museum of Art; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; and New York Public Library. He received a Guggenheim fellowship in 2006. In 2007 Aperture published a monograph of his work titled Early Recordings.