Mallory Breiner "Fountain"
Mallory Breiner "Fountain" 2026
Painting, Oil paint on canvas
Dimensions: 36 x 36 inches
Unique
Signed
Mallory Breiner is a painter whose practice explores themes of care and the history of maternal representation. She received a BA in Fine Arts from Saint Michael’s College in 2007 and an MFA from Hunter College in 2013. She is currently an adjunct professor of Art at Saint Michael’s College and Champlain College in Vermont.
Breiner’s recent exhibitions include the Taube Museum of Art (ND), the Emerging Artists Exhibition at the Cambridge Art Association (MA), The Every Woman Biennial at La MaMa Gallery (NY), and Five Myles Gallery (NY). In 2020, she was an artist in residence at the Vermont Studio Center.
Artist Statement
Mallory Breiner makes relational paintings, in which images sourced from art history, the internet, film stills, and personal photographs, are linked in unexpected and generative ways. The paint handling swings between gestural abstraction and carefully rendered imagery. Through a process of choosing, cropping, interpreting, and combining images, she creates ambiguous narratives for the viewer to wade into. Recurring objects such as breasts, dog mouths, pearls, fruit, and flowers become symbolic actors that suggest the complex realms of female identity, motherhood, sensuality, propriety, and rebelliousness.
The pieces in the exhibition conflate two registers of information. The Italian lactating fountain Fontana di Spina Corona is paired with trompe l’oeil teardrop diamonds hovering over the picture plane. A gestural painting of a dog biting the arm of a man is overlaid with a grid of pearls, each painted as an object with a drop shadow. Both present active subjects, moving, flowing, secreting, aggressing, with a veneer of propriety, luxury, beauty and demureness.
Breiner’s work probes and deconstructs the idealized or stereotypical image of the maternal. Instead the paintings dream of spaces where the more vulnerable, challenging, tender and expansive experiences of matrescence can be enacted. The paintings aim to be open enough to reach any viewer, as mothering, nurturing, empathy, and the lack thereof, are becoming increasingly urgent forces in a precarious world.