Sebastiaan Bremer - Super Modern Things

by Sebastiaan Bremer, Julie Castellano, Christian Viveros-Fauné

Graphic design by Mart. Warmerdam

99 Publishers, Haarlem, 2026. Hardcover.

For more information or to purchase the book please visit 99 Publishers.

Excerpts below:

First to Fall: Sebastiaan Bremer’s Flower Paintings

by Christian Viveros-Fauné

Brooklyn, 2026

(…)

A fashioner of intimist pictures, Bremer also knows to connect the inherent seductiveness of his flower-scapes to the eternal folly of market instrumentalization; that, and our current madness for everything from crypto to neofascism to the dangers, real and imagined, of The Singularity. As he sagely puts it, there exist, in every age—though clearly in some way more than others—“intricate connections between joy and beauty, greed and decay.” Despite their stunning good looks—one particularly fetching arrangement in dotted and stained inks called Literally and Figuratively (2026) recalls Jacob Elordi’s frame filling a movie screen—Bremer’s artworks reach backwards to contemporize the present, while acknowledging, exploiting even, the cargo hold beauty creates to smuggle inconvenient truths. This explains, at least in part, why the artist considered christening his 21st century vision of flower power “Sinnepoppen”. An erstwhile, now masked, reference to Roemer Visscher’s 1614 volume of illustrated parables—the English translation of the original title is “dolls” or “figures for the mind”—his previous appellation cites a once wildly popular Dutch book; one that trafficked in 196 engravings and as many cautionary tales. Its subtitle: “Wise lessons about the pursuit of wealth.”

(…)

“First to flower, first to fall.”

The line is from an utterly forgettable movie, the 2017 film Tulip Fever. But I can’t seem to shake its scripted metaphor in ruminating on Bremer’s exquisite flower pictures. It returns unbidden as I study one of his last notes on a powerful painting series that has been more than three decades in the making.

“Flowers embody joy, and at the same time you know they are going to wither in three days,” the artist writes with hard-won optimism. “That they are so short-lived is not sad, but paradoxically is the very thing that makes their presence precious. Like life, you don’t hate it because it’s brief, you must love it because it is short.”

Knowing Sebastiaan

by Julie Castellano

New York, 2026

“I met his work before I met him. The first time was at Roebling Hall, which was then a new and exciting gallery in NYC, sometime around 1998. I didn’t know anything about him then—just the work, on its own terms. Before I ever met Sebastiaan, I saw his work and responded to it immediately. That feeling stayed with me forever.

There was something about those obsessive dots covering the surface that felt like an invitation to explore. I couldn’t look away. I was completely mystified. I was young then—impatient, passionate, reckless, ambitious—and the work seemed to operate on an entirely different sense of time. All of those tiny, hand-painted dots must have taken forever to make, layered over a family photograph that would have taken a fraction of a second to capture. That contrast stayed with me. The conversation between the subject matter of the photograph and the painting on top was uniquely compelling.

I stood there longer than I expected to. The longer I looked, the more the image began to shift. Strange, psychedelic forms emerged—fragments that felt like they belonged to something older, Old Master references I couldn’t quite place but were put into new context, and then those areas that dissolved into abstraction. The surface opened up into pathways—wandering, associative, like a dream you couldn’t fully explain but somehow understood anyway. It was an invitation to explore. And I didn’t want it to end.”