Confetti Garden
Lou Breininger
May 24th - July 6th, 2025
Insert Press General Projects
Opening 7-10pm, Saturday, May 24, 2025
General Projects
3609 Pomona St Backhouse
Los Angeles, CA 90031
Open Hours: Thursdays 7-9pm and Saturdays 1-4pm
or by appointment email insertpress@gmail.com
Insert Press is pleased to announce Confetti Garden, a solo exhibition of new work by Lou Breininger. Known for their intricate kiln glass constructions and rich visual vocabularies rooted in domestic pattern, folk aesthetics, and queer material culture, Breininger creates luminous surfaces that shimmer with historical and emotional charge.
The works in Confetti Garden continue Breininger’s exploration of pattern as both structure and rupture—borrowing from traditions as wide-ranging as Pennsylvania Dutch decorative arts, stained glass, and 1970s Pattern and Decoration. Each composition feels simultaneously precise and improvisational: floral motifs, grid systems, and kitsch textures repeat and fracture across layered planes of fused glass.
Started during a residency at the Yucca Valley Material Lab, Breininger’s kiln glass practice emerged out of their background in painting and textile-based airbrush work. These new pieces retain that same painter’s sensitivity, but now rendered in glass powder, frit, and collaged fragments—materials that literalize the notion of surface tension. Informed by years of experimentation with carpet, craft, and vernacular imagery, these pieces open portals into what the artist calls “a world I want to live in—a queer utopia built from mashed-up materials, theatrical characters, and glimpses of outdoor longing.”
Drawing on influences from the Pattern and Decoration movement and feminist critiques of minimalism, Breininger positions ornament not as excess but as defiance. The grid, in their hands, becomes both centrifugal and centripetal—a structure that gestures outwardly to invisible patterns beyond the frame while holding within it a charged and intimate terrain.
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Lou Breininger (b. Hagerstown, MD) is an artist and outdoor enthusiast who grew up on a farm in rural Pennsylvania. They received a BFA in Painting from Arcadia University (Glenside, PA) and an MFA in Painting from Cranbrook Academy of Art (Bloomfield Hills, MI). They have attended studio programs at Goldsmiths College (London, England) and School of Visual Arts (New York, NY). Their work has been included in exhibitions at smoke the moon (Santa Fe, NM), Outer Space (Concord, NH), Odd Ark LA (Los Angeles, CA), Fellows of Contemporary Art (Los Angeles, CA), and Vox Populi (Philadelphia, PA). Breininger currently lives and works in Los Angeles, CA.