Sebastiaan Bremer

Born:
1970
Residence:
Brooklyn, New York, USA
Nationality:
German
Trust:
APT New York
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PRESS & PUBLICATIONS

  • Mitchell-Innes & Nash will be hosting an exhibition “MY PEN IS HUGE” by artist Amanda Ross-Ho at the gallery’s New York location.

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  • An essential guide to the 57th edition of the event that has the whole art world talking, featuring new work by Mark Bradford and an exhibition curated by trolls

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  • Marc Spiegler, the global director of Art Basel, said Hong Kong has its galleries, while Miami is known for its private collections and Basel for its museums.

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  • Chiharu Shiota fills a Savannah institution with crimson yarn and discarded wooden school chairs.

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  • A first look at ‘Viva Arte Viva’ at the Arsenale.

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  • Ahead of the third Antwerp Art Weekend, a guide to the best shows across the city.

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  • The Venice Biennale’s centerpiece exhibition, “Viva Arte Viva,” may altogether falter in the breadth of its curatorial framework.

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  • The Icelandic Art Center unveiled the Icelandic Pavilion — “Out of Controll in Venice” — for the 57th International Art Exhibition - La Biennale di Ve

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  • Exhibitions

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  • The most important global art event of the year is upon us, as thousands descend upon the slowly submerging islands in the Venetian Lagoon to view the microcosm of the art world that is the 57th Venice Biennale. In keeping with the theme of the exhibition by this year’s curator, Christine Macel, Viva Arte Viva, in which she “orientate[s] the Biennale toward the art and the artists,” we are looking at the most sensational National Pavilions through the artists whose art will activate them.

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  • 10 Exhibitions Opening This Week

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  • One could argue that the buddy cop genre has been with us since well before In the Heat of the Night; that it’s among the prototypical literary genres.

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  • The fourteenth edition of Documenta takes place, for the first time in the institution’s history, across two locations.

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  • Documenta 14 is so vast, dispersed, and enigmatic, that it is literally impossible to experience all of it (not to mention that the other half of the quinquennial exhibition has yet to take place, in Kassel, Germany). Yet the earnest visitor should make the effort, while in Athens, not only to take in what he or she can of the international offerings of documenta, but to wander off the beaten path of the biennial map, and sample what the local art scene of Athens has to offer.

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  • Last month, from February 21-24, the Savannah College of Art and Design (SCAD) held its eight annual edition of deFINE ART, its multi-day event of exhibition openings, talks, lectures, and workshops.

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  • The Savannah College of Art and Design's museum-quality fine art exhibits are a regional jewel.

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  • The New Art Dealers Alliance (NADA) opened its doors yesterday at Skylight Clarkson North for the sixth edition of NADA New York—and it was filled with fresh vibes.

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  • 10 Exhibitions Opening This Week

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  • Looted art and ancient works from Iraq that have never been exhibited outside that country will appear in its pavilion at the Venice Biennale this yea

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  • Named after Italian artist Piero Manzoni’s piece Socle du monde (Base of the World), 1961, the Socle du Monde Biennale is coorganized by the ZERO Foun

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  • 10 Exhibitions Opening This Week

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  • The 2017 Venice Biennale, opening on May 13, has revealed the list of one hundred and twenty artists participating in the international exhibition “Viva Arte Viva,” curated by Christine Macel.

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  • Chiharu Shiota continues her exploration of memory in Infinity Lines, a new expansive site-specific installation for SCAD Museum of Art, Savannah, Georgia. This immersive artwork is the newest iteration of Shiota’s examination of the interconnectivity between possessions and the narratives they hold.

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  • PARIS – To coincide with Chiharu Shiota’s current exhibition Where Are We Going? in Paris, here we look at her textile creations and investigate the way she uses thread as a way to explore memory and belonging.

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  • Praz-Delavallade is hosting an inaugural group exhibition for its new gallery space in Los Angeles. The exhibition titled “I Love L.A.” will run from

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  • Mary Mary Gallery is hosting a group show “Curve of a hill like the curve of a green shoulder” from January 28 through March 11, 2017.

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  • Urbano Project will present Librería Donceles, a socially-engaged art project consisting of an itinerant bookstore of more than 10,000 used books in Spanish. While in residence at Urbano, the participatory art installation will be a meeting place for the community, hosting a series of bilingual salon-like gatherings for conversations, performances and workshops designed to encourage cultural understanding, tolerance and social activism.

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  • New York artist Pablo Helguera’s secondhand bookstore, Librería Donceles, seems particularly well-suited for Boston, a city known for its literary leanings. The traveling art project, comprising more than 10,000 volumes spanning numerous genres, opens Friday for an 11-week run at the art studio Urbano in Jamaica Plain and will provide visitors with a unique experience: Organizers say it will be the only bookstore in town devoted to used Spanish-language titles.

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  • After thoroughly reviewing the highlights (and lowlights) of 2016, we wondered who and what we’ll be thinking about and looking forward to this coming year.

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  • Jack Hanley Gallery, New York, is hosting its “30th Anniversary Exhibition: Attics of My Life” that is on view from January 8, 2017 through February 5, 2017.

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BIOGRAPHY

Sebastiaan Bremer was born in Amsterdam, The Netherlands, in 1970. He attended the open studio program at the Vrije Academie in The Hague from 1989 until 1991. During his early years he meticulously reproduced personal photographs in paint. He received the Werkbeurs Grant from FBKVB in Holland and moved to New York in 1992 where he began to work primarily in black and white, reemphasizing his connection to photography.

In 1994 he had his first solo show at Galerie Reisel, Holland and began exhibiting in as well as curating group shows. He was assistant to several artists in New York, and worked on production for the photographers Inez van Lamsweerde and Vinoodh Matadin from 1996 until 2000. In 1998 he produced Liza May Post's 'Trying' film and photograph. In that same year he attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in Maine were he began experimenting with murals, collage paintings, and began drawing directly on photographs, the style which he continues to use today. In 1999 he finished his first large scale Ink on C-Print drawing entitled 10 AM-PM. In 2001 he had a solo debut, 'Veronica' at Roebling Hall, New York.

His work is part of several important collections in the US and abroad, including the Victoria & Albert Museum; London, Museum of Modern Art; New York, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, The Zabludowicz Trust; London, the Rabobank collection; The Netherlands, AKZO Nobel collection; The Netherlands, Lodeveans Contemporary LLP; London, and the Berger Collection; Zurich.

Sebastiaan Bremer's artwork has been exhibited at the Tate Modern, London; the Brooklyn Museum of Art, The Aldrich Museum; Connecticut and at PS1/MoMA, New York, Het Gemeentemuseum, The Hague. He has had solo exhibitions at Air de Paris; Galerie Barbara Thumm, Berlin; Roebling Hall, New York; James Fuentes, New York; BravinLee Programs, New York; Hales Gallery, London; Mia Sundberg Galleri, Stockholm; and Het Gemeentemuseum, The Hague. He recently completed work on a commission for the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, in which he referenced work in LACMA's collection of Dutch Master paintings. He was an artist in residence at Het Vijfde Seizoen in the Netherlands in 2009. He was a visiting artist and guest lecturer at Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond, Virginia, Cooper Union, New York, the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts in Copenhagen, and the School of Visual Arts in New York City.

 

Bremer’s technique is novel, and utterly hybrid. Using various inks, he draws directly on slightly blurry C-print enlargements of photographs, and often adds splotches and streaks of photographic dye. Almost always, the underlying photographic images have much to do with personal and family history: a best friend from Bremer’s teenage years, a shot of himself as a kid, a view of a room taken from under his grandmother’s piano, his family on vacation, a former girlfriend. These are the unpretentious snapshot images, the family album images, the photographic mementos of a life that Bremer meticulously and obsessively draws on—so meticulously, in fact, and with such fine, tiny lines that you figure he either uses a magnifying glass or is in a trance (neither is the case.). In some of Bremer’s works, the underlying image is quite clear, while in others it’s almost totally obscured, but in any event one sees it through a scrim or a veil of intense surface activity, which can be at once elaborately ornamental, psychedelic, playful (replete with suggestions of doodling), turbulent, and downright magical. Always, Bremer’s found photographs become dreamlike and fantastical, and two opposite impulses are fused: documentation and hallucination. Moreover, while Bremer admits to “a high level of automatism” in devising his drawings, you also sense that this automatism involves a great deal of complex human feeling, ranging from harrowing fears and losses to whimsy and blissful repose.

 


For additional information about this artist, visit Mutual Art