Containers & Poles

Gallery Luisotti is pleased to announce its upcoming exhibition Frank Breuer – Containers & Poles. In his first solo exhibition at Gallery Luisotti, Breuer presents a selection of color photographs depicting iconic emblems of our post-industrial society. Taking a cue from his aesthetic forbearers, in the New Topographics, Breuer approaches shipping containers and utility poles with a keen awareness of their minimal spatial dynamics. Pushing beyond these surfaces, Breuer’s photography underlines the crude manifestations of a technologically advanced society in objects signifying commerce and communications.

Breuer’s images of shipping containers were photographed in the ports of Antwerp, one of the oldest and most active waterways in Europe. Breuer photographed each container by itself, with little or no point of reference to their actual proportions, thus emphasizing the formal aspects of the structures. In these striking images, the containers seem like architectural remnants of a post-industrial age, somewhat incongruous with our digitally dependent culture. They remind us of our prevalent connection with industrial progress and material consumption.

The genesis of Breuer’s most recent works – the utility poles – began during his year as a guest instructor at Harvard University, allowing him the opportunity to travel through Massachusetts, Florida, and some parts of the Midwest. In these places, Breuer focused on the immediate utilitarian outlets of suburban American life, such as restaurant chains, motel entrances, gas stations, and highway rest stops. Standing upright or slightly off balance, the poles signal the retrograde aspect of the evolving post-industrial suburban landscape. They do not so much connote progress as the disorder of a globalized world crawling through modernity.