Sebastiaan Bremer

Sebastiaan Bremer (Amsterdam, Netherlands, 1970)  lives and works in NYC. 

Throughout his career, Sebastiaan Bremer has used pre-existing images to explore deep ideas about time, memory, and processing. In his early years, he meticulously reproduced personal snapshots in paint. Over the years, this process of “re-thinking” past visual documents has led Bremer to experiment with different techniques and materials that alter the image’s material existence. 

Three Guilty Landscapes - Sunken Forest, Sous Bois, Rendez-Vous

Sebastiaan Bremer turns photographs into dreams. Like a dream, Three Guilty Landscapes—the new print series he made in collaboration with Graphicstudio—overflows with memories, thoughts, ideas and layers of meaning. Working with colored backgrounds, the Dutch-born artist silkscreened drawings of trees recalled from rural walks in upstate New York; between these images he layered photographs of forests, which he then altered by hand with paint and ink. “I wanted to reach back as far as possible back in time for this series,” Bremer says. Among his inspirations, he explains, were “nineteenth century photographs by Eugene Cuvelier, Henry Le Secq and Constant Famin, early pioneers of the medium in landscape.”

Bremer says he conceived of these three prints—Sunken Forest, Sous Bois and Rendez-Vous—while also thinking of the artist Armando (Herman Dirk van Dodeweerd). Armando, an important Dutch postwar artist, coined the term “guilty landscapes” in response to years spent growing up next to a German concentration camp near Amersfoort, Holland. Bremer’s own American-inspired guilty landscapes hover between night and day, past and present, reality and unreality. Equal part prints, photographs and drawings, his trees appear and disappear into fields of dots that suggest hidden lives and meanings far beyond the images’ surface.

I’ve been holding my breath now for a while now #2 - From Life During Wartime Portfolio

In 2000, Bremer created a body work titled I held my breath for 13 hours afraid she would not come home. In this series, he drew a sequence of small dots on top of a photo of his niece Veerle swimming underwater in a pool; these dots subsequently became waves, seemingly keeping her suspended and safe. 

Sebastiaan Bremer’s work has been shown at Tate Modern (London, UK), The Brooklyn Museum of Art (New York), Kunstmuseum Den Haag (The Hague, Netherlands), The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum (Ridgefield, Connecticut), Projektraum I (Berlin, Germany), MOCA Tucson (Tucson, AZ), the Tang Teaching Museum, Skidmore College (Saratoga Springs, NY), and the Warhol Museum (Pittsburgh, PA). His work is represented in the public collections of the Victoria & Albert Museum (London, UK), MoMA (NYC), and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

 

Further Resources

Artist's Site: basbremer.com

Printmaking + Sculpture Terms

Printmaking Glossary

Sculpture Glossary

Sales

For sales, or more information about an edition, please contact Graphicstudio at (813) 974-3503 or gsoffice@usf.edu.

Copyright + Reproduction

Images of the artwork are jointly owned by the artist and Graphicstudio. Reproduction of any kind including electronic media must be expressly approved by Graphicstudio.