Frank Breuer has been recording standardized industrial spaces in Germany, Holland and Belgium for five years with his large-format camera. Architecture in the predominantly urban cultivated landscape becomes the central element in Breuer's photographs. In their austere monumentality, today's industrial buildings seem endlessly expandable and neglect a human proportion or familiar relationship. He draws attention not only to the scale of a building's imagined and relative size, but also to the sense that such structures function in their topographic environment as alien and displaced objects. Breuer's interest in modular structures resides in the reduced formal relationships and monochrome sequencing within the photographs themselves.
Parallel to his investigation of generic buildings, Breuer is also interested in commercial trademarks, logos and signs. As identification props for consumer products, one's ideals and desires are closely linked to trademark names whose logos confront us in virtually all areas of daily life from packaging and magazine advertisements to giant billboards. Breuer sees such signs as having no clearly defined size, and just as in photography, scale can be lost. As cataloged in his documentation of large outdoor signs, he is especially interested when a trademark's flat, two-dimensional and iconographic image is juxtaposed within a less familiar landscape context.
Frank Breuer lives in Cologne, Germany. From 1992 to 1996, he studied with Bernd Becher at the Dusseldorf Art Academy. His works are in several museum collections including the Museum for New Art, Karlsruhe; Museum Folkwang, Essen; and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.