Sebastiaan Bremer

Sebastiaan Bremer is a contemporary artist known for printmaking and photographic techniques. Bornin Amsterdam in 1970, he 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.