Born 1927, Oakland, CA

Mala Breuer grew up attending classes in painting and drawing from a young age at the California College of Arts and Crafts. After high school she attended the, now, San Francisco Art Institute where she studied under many notable artists, including Richard Diebenkorn, Clyfford Still, David Park, and Mark Rothko. Breuer matured as an artist in, and was profoundly affected by, the era of Abstract Expressionism, focusing more on material and application than representation. By the late 1960s, she was pouring water thinned washes of acrylic paint onto large, wet, stretched, vertical canvases. During an exhibition of those works, a San Francisco gallerist suggested that she head to New York, where abstraction, Minimalism, and Conceptual Art were continuing to gain traction. Breuer listened to this advice and set out to New York with intentions of staying only one year, she stayed for eight. In New York she began working with a palette knife, making direct, abstract marks with dark colors and with great density. She gained recognition as a significant painter during her time there. In 1984 she moved to northern New Mexico, a landscape that influenced Breuer’s use of color, light, and more minimal compositions. She painted for another twenty-plus years in the desert southwest until her death in 2017.

Mala Breuer attended the, now, San Francisco Art Institute. Her work is included in the public collections of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Museum of Fine Arts in Santa Fe, NM; the Albuquerque Museum; the Richard Levy Gallery in Albuquerque, NM; FIAC in Paris, France; Capital Group in Los Angeles, CA; and the Laura Carpenter Fine Art Gallery in Santa Fe, NM.