Sebastiaan Bremer

Sebastiaan Bremer works across photography and painting, bridging the descriptive authority of the photograph with the psychological depth of painting. Across his series, he works directly onto photographic images with ink and acrylic, building surfaces that move from fine, nearly imperceptible marks to bold and expansive passages of color. As he has described it, this process allows him to “make my point of view visible inside the photographed reality.” Like memory, the image changes with each return.

His series move between the personal and the art historical. In Schöner Götterfunken (To Joy), Bremer returns to the family album, exploring memory, nostalgia, and the passage of time. Across these works, distinctions between past and present begin to soften as images are revisited and reworked. His characteristic fields of dots, which he has likened to biological pathways or neural connections, draw the viewer into the surface of the work. Up close, they form intricate patterns; at a distance, the underlying image comes into focus. Other series, including his series of flower works, engage Dutch Golden Age painting and vintage tulip catalogues, extending his interest in how images circulate across time. His marks move across the surface in ways that recall processes of growth, pollination and repetition,  suggesting a more organic, almost biological transmission of the image.

Sebastiaan Bremer (b. 1970, The Netherlands) lives and works in Italy. His work has been exhibited at institutions including Tate Modern, London and MoMA P.S.1, New York, as well as the Brooklyn Museum, New York; The Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh; The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, Ridgefield, CT; and the Gemeentemuseum, The Hague. His work is held in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York; National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Victoria and Albert Museum, London; Albright Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo; and the New York Public Library, among others. A monograph of his flower series, Super-Modern Things, will be published in Fall 2026.