Andrea Marie Breiling Swallowtail

Almine Rech New York is pleased to present Swallowtail, a solo exhibition by Andrea Marie Breiling. This is Breiling's third solo show with the gallery. The exhibition will be on view from May 2 to June 10, 2023 in Almine Rech’s NYC gallery.

Andrea Marie Breiling’s newest works draw inspiration from Swallowtail butterflies, known for their particularly wide wingspan, and for their vivid coloring which often combines intricate patterns of primary colors and white, outlined and bisected by blackish veins, and peppered with dark bluish-brown voids. Like a close-up view of Swallowtail wings, Breiling’s recent spray paint paintings are at once atmospheric and kaleidoscopic while firmly grounded by a deeply-layered and rhythmic foundation. In a nod to Jackson Pollock’s penchant for uncommonly narrow and wide canvases, many of Breiling’s new works stretch the bounds of traditional landscape canvas proportions. This deliberate scale decision seems to have pushed her mark-making approach in a new direction. 

In her 2022 solo show titled, “Ribbons,” Breiling approached large portrait-oriented canvases with broad swooping curves of intertwining thick lines, resulting in a distinctive flowing ribboning effect. However, her recent shift to narrow landscape-orientation canvases has lead Breiling to lay down repeated patterns of vibrant mark-making and achieves her signature ethereal layering effect with noticeably bolder, more precise, and substantially thinner line work. During a recent studio visit, the artist highlighted a particularly large piece that exemplifies this new approach. The impressive piece, almost three times as wide as it is high, has a darkly colorful and layered nearly-cosmic background which, from a distance, is almost entirely obfuscated by a wild and almost-symmetrical explosion of white and eggshell paint. However, as Breiling articulates, “The closer you get to the work, the more the surface begins to reveal its details. It’s the same experience I had when I first looked at a Swallowtail wing up close - what seemed like a mostly-white wing from afar was suddenly transformed into a maze of colorful layers and grid-like patterns of dark veins. I was amazed that the surface could appear lighter-than-air and magical from afar, but up close, that very same surface was an incredibly complex nanostructure made of iridescent scales and longitudinal ridges. I find the combination of complexity and sheer beauty found in Nature to be awe-inspiring and wondrous.” All in all, Breiling’s new works seem to make a compelling case that paintings can elicit that same sense of wonder - the wonder found in the Swallowtail. 

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Andrea Marie Breiling (b. Phoenix, AZ) received her BFA in Studio Art and Gender Studies from UC Irvine in 2008 and her MFA in Studio Art from Claremont Graduate University in 2014. In the Spring of 2021, Breiling presented her first solo exhibition with Almine Rech, titled, “I Think I Might Have Inhaled You” in Brussels, Belgium, and her second solo show with Almine Rech in the Fall of 2021, titled, “Sweet Dreams of Rhythm and Dancing,” in London.

She has presented additional solo exhibitions at Broadway Gallery, New York; Night Gallery, Los Angeles and Miami; Achenbach Hagemeier, Düsseldorf; Galleri Urbane, Dallas; Sonce Alexander Gallery, Los Angeles; and Peggy Phelps Gallery, Claremont. Breiling has participated in group shows at Rachel Uffner Gallery, New York; SUNNY, New York; Collaborations, Copenhagen; Library Street Collective, Detroit; Skibum MacArthur, Los Angeles; Various Small Fires, Seoul; The Mass, Tokyo; Jack Siebert & Caio, Los Angeles; Carl Kostyál Gallery, Stockholm; Blum & Poe, Los Angeles; Achenbach Hagemeier, Berlin; Wilding Cran Gallery, Los Angeles; and Night Gallery, Los Angeles, among others. 

Her work belongs in the public collections of ICA Miami, FL; Deji Art Museum, Nanjing; Dangxia Art Foundation, Beijing; X Museum, Beijing; and CVG Foundation, Beijing. 

Breiling was recognized by Artsy as one of the “Top 10 Women Abstract Artists on the Rise” in 2023, the same year that she was named one of Ocula’s “Five Artists to Watch,” and was highlighted by Barry Schwabsky in ArtNet as one of the “13 Artists Poised to Break Out Big in 2023.” Breiling’s December 2022 solo show in Miami was featured by Cultured Magazine as one of the “9 Miami Art Week Openings You Shouldn’t Miss.” Breiling and her work have been featured multiple times on Artsy’s “10 In-demand works on Artsy This Week,” along with features in GQ Style, Whitewall, Artforum, LA Weekly, The Nation, Abstract, Cultured Magazine,the Los Angeles Times, Art And Antiques Magazine; Let’s Make Lots of Monet; The Hollywood Reporter; Larry’ s List, and LALA Magazine, amongst others. 

Andrea lives and works in the New York metropolitan area. 

- Liam McCarthy, Graduate of Harvard University, 2002 Degree in Psychology