Green Line Cafe

now up at The Green Line at Powelton Village:

Anna Breininger

By covering and violently uncovering textures, materials and patters I create situations where familiarity and comfort come under rushing attack.  Driven by the need to explore these co-dependent and contradictory relationships, I build layered paintings only to tear away at the final surface.

The use of simple shapes and patters allows me to relate layers to everyday rituals and domestic debris.  They feel home made and amateur: a half hearted attempt at beautifying a space.  Each layer is soothing repetition; it is basic in execution and innocuous in content.  Rather than simply congealing to form a final surface relatively void of detail layers are thrown into a situation where they are forced to exist alongside each other, becoming a new and uncomfortable reality.  This last act serves to jolt the paintings out of the realm of the familiar and into a new and threatening situation where entropy and violence dictate the outcome.

When working on a small scale, these paintings become less about interiors and more about objects.  Not only does a smaller work begin to feel precious, but in this case also beings to feel like stacks of memory taken out of context and belonging to a large, more absent whole.

Posted March 9, 2009