This body of work is an investigation of early twentieth-century domestic textile design and Jewish-owned textile companies in Czech Bohemia. Breuer's artwork responds to their visual legacy and to their role within a distinct economic and cultural landscape. The case study for his research and artwork is Carl Breuer and Sons (CB&S), his family’s former textile printing business, founded 1897 in Bohemia. In 1939, upon the German takeover of Czechoslovakia, the CB&S company was seized and sold to new, Nazi-approved owners, as was the fate of all other Jewish-owned property in German-occupied areas. In time, most of his family members were sent to concentration camps and murdered. With the loss of their livelihood and then their very lives, most remnants of their work also disappeared. 

During his 2016 research trip to the Czech Republic, Breuer uncovered a substantial company archive of CB&S printed fabric samples and designs, held for decades within the Czech Textile Museum in Česká Skalice, as well as the company’s business records held in state archives in Zámrsk and in Dvůr Králové nad Labem, where the CB&S company was based. Breuer was able to amass a rich collection of primary source material in the form of digital scans and photographs depicting original CB&S textiles and samples, business records and correspondence. This archival material became a springboard for his art practice and led him to create an array of print-based objects and installations which raise questions about labor, authorship and appropriation while touching on his family’s story of persecution. Breuer refers to this endeavor as, “a reclamation project in which I resurrect, reinterpret and indeed, reclaim the designs of the lost Breuer family business and make them my own.”