Sebastiaan Bremer (b. Amsterdam, The Netherlands, 1970) attended the open studio program in Vrije Academie in The Hague (1989-1991) and subsequently moved to New York City in 1992 where he now lives and works.
Throughout his career, Bremer has in one way or another used pre-existing images to explore profound ideas about time, memory, and meaning. In his early years, he meticulously reproduced personal snap-shots in painting. Over the following years, this process of re-envisioning visual documents of the past led Bremer to experiment with different techniques and materials. He sought to alter the image’s material existence, add another dimension, and shift the viewer’s perception of the image’s purported meaning. In the late 1990s he began to draw directly on the surface of personal photographs, covering the images with intricate patterns of strokes and dots or applying splashes of paint and ink.
Since then, Bremer has complicated this process of alteration, cutting and carving away sections of emulsion to create etchings on the photographic surface and using collage techniques to create hybrid images. He has also expanded his range of visual sources (from classical sculpture to modernist photography) and media (such as in Bloemen, his series of re-worked vintage lithographic flower prints), and explored new forms and additional dimensions through multimedia installation incorporating projections, sculptural works, found objects and sound (as in his 2015 exhibition at Hales Gallery, Σπήλαιο [Spilaio]). More recently he has experimented with archival fadeless gloss paper, lacking in any photographic imagery. This has resulted in a large series of portraits and a diptych, shown in his solo exhibitions Nocturne at Edwynn Houk Gallery in New York City and I Am New Here at Ron Mandos in Amsterdam, both in 2020.
In 1998, Bremer went to Skowhegan, in 2001, to Art Omi and in 2018 to Mac Dowell. He was a visiting professor at VCU in 2006, and was resident artist at the Lower East Side Printshop in 2006/2007. He has also worked as a visiting professor at the Royal Academy (Kopenhagen), the Cooper Union and SVA (New York), Virginia Commonweath University (Richmond) among others.
In 2016 Fort Worth Contemporary Arts at TCU held a mid-career retrospective of Bremer's work. Other selected shows include Tate Modern (London), The Brooklyn Museum of Art (New York), Het Gemeentemuseum (The Hague), The Aldrich Museum (Connecticut), Air de Paris (Paris), James Fuentes Gallery ( New York), Marlborough Gallery (New York), Storefront for Art and Architecture (New York), Mia Sundberg Gallery (Stockholm), Projektraum I (Berlin), Kunsthal KAdE (Amersfoort), MOCA Tucson (Tucson), the Tang Museum, Skidmore College (Saratoga Springs), and the Warhol Museum (Pittsburg). Bremer's work is represented in important private and public collections such as Victoria & Albert Museum (London), MoMA (New York), LACMA (Los Angeles), Berger collection (Zurich), The Zabludowicz Trust (London), and the Rabobank Collection, UBS Collection, Akzo Nobel Collection (The Netherlands).
He is currently represented by Edwynn Houk Gallery (New York City), Hales Gallery (London) and Ron Mandos Gallery (Amsterdam).
Portrait by Andrea Blanch