![Room in the Elephant (after Alavoine) [diptych], 2011](http://prod-images.exhibit-e.com/www_houkgallery_com/ASB_1902_07470.jpg)
Series
View
(2010)
Exhibitions
View
June 9 - July 28, 2012
March 3 - April 23, 2011
Press
ViewEyemazing
2011Artists have intermingled the mediums of photography and painting since the inception of photography in the nineteenth century. Even further back, according to David Hockney's Secret Knowledge, painters of the Renaissance used optic tools such as the camera obscura and the camera lucida to usher in a new era of realism in Western art. Once these techniques were finally captured through chemicals as photographs, painting and photography began a process of defining and redefining each other and their conceptual underpinnings. Within a century, photography helped to liberate painting from its illustrative obligation, while artists and theorists released photography from the limitations of realism and documentation.
But despite the emancipation of postmodernism, the things that we see in a photograph, the pictorial assumptions that remain convincingly tied to life, are hard to undermine. Which is why the work of Sebastiaan Bremer is so surprisingly effective.
To read the full article, click on download.
Art in America
October, 2006The Mediums of drawing and photography are mutually reinvigorated in Sebastian Bremer's dazzling new hybrid works. For more than five years, Bremer has been drawing ethereal, shimmering skeins of dots, lines and circles in white and colored inks, which he applied directly to the surfaces of personal snap-shots. Then he re-photographs the images and enlarges them as C-prints. Family and Friends, places and landscapes from Bremer's life, sometimes out-of-focus and barely discernible feature in photographs that function as fixed memories of vanished moments.
to read full article click on download
Sebastiaan Bremer
b. Amsterdam, Netherlands, 1970Sebastiaan Bremer is renowned for transforming ordinary snapshots into grandly baroque and surreal tableaux by a careful process of retouching and enlargement. Since his first solo show, in 1994, he has exhibited in venues such as the Tate Gallery, London, the Brooklyn Museum of Art, New York, and the Aldrich Museum, Connecticut. He has been based in the United States since 1992.
Although Bremer has always been interested in photography, it wasn’t until the late 1990s that he began to draw directly on the surface of photographs. He has been inspired in part by nineteenth century spirit photography, and fin de siècle Symbolists such as the poet Rainer Maria Rilke, and painter Odilon Redon, but his methods partake of advanced photographic techniques. Often he will begin with a simple snapshot of friends or family or familiar places, and after enlarging it far beyond conventional dimensions, he will begin altering and embellishing the image with India ink and photographic dye. He has often used the ink to produce fine patterns of lines reminiscent of cobwebs, or readings from seismographs. Photographic dyes also enable him to blur and mute some forms while accentuating others, and make some colors bloom while others recede into mysterious darkness. The result is an image that seems to literally vibrate with hidden consequence, as if the subject matter has sent cracks across the surface of the picture. Whilst Bremer’s choice of images inevitably grounds his work in his own biography, his imagery also makes reference to alchemy, art, and the occult, establishing unexpected connections between ordinary life, history, and the unconscious.
Sebastiaan Bremer lives and works in New York. He studied at the Vrije Academie, The Hague, and Skowhegan School of Art and Sculpture, Maine. He has published two major catalogs: Monkey Brain (2003), and Avila (2006). His work is included in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York, and the Victoria and Albert Museum, London.