Opening reception with the artist: Saturday, April 18, 3-5 pm
Super-Modern Things, an exhibition of new work by Sebastiaan Bremer, follows the life of an image after its creation. The exhibition brings together a group of 12 recent works, each centered on a flower that Bremer transforms through photography and painting.
The show’s title, drawn from Vladimir Nabokov, points to how time shapes and reshapes the way images are read. Few images make this clearer than flowers, which have long carried meanings of beauty, mortality, and exchange. This history is particularly resonant within the Dutch tradition, where the flower has served as both subject and symbol, moving between art, science, and commerce. Bremer’s works take up the distance between the short life of a flower and its persistence as an image, a form that has circulated across time and cultures, taken up by artists, scientists, and markets alike. The exhibition builds on his sustained engagement with this subject, allowing him to return to questions of how images are made, circulated, and experienced.
Bremer works with found imagery and the afterlives of print culture. He begins with photographs of flowers drawn from historical sources, including Dutch Golden Age paintings by Rachel Ruysch and postwar Dutch horticultural plates. These images are already far from the living flower, from the scent and season that once defined it. Bremer photographs them again, extending that distance, and then works directly on the surface in acrylic and ink. His painting moves between precision and release. He concentrates fine marks into tight fields, while elsewhere color is allowed to spread and thin. Lines are drawn, repeated, and broken. At times the underlying flower remains legible; at others it gives way to color and gesture. Painting moves across the image, altering it while keeping its earlier forms in view.
Across the exhibition, each work carries traces of its source while remaining visibly reworked. Layers of paint accumulate on the printed image, so that earlier forms are held in view rather than erased. The flower, already distant from its living form, takes on a new presence through this process of repetition and alteration. Bremer’s works suggest a kind of alchemy, in which images build and transform value through each act of reproduction and intervention, extending the life of the flower while keeping its disappearance in view.
Sebastiaan Bremer (b. 1970, The Netherlands) lives and works in Italy. His work has been exhibited at institutions including solo exhibitions at the Tate Modern, London and MoMA P.S.1, NY as well as at the Brooklyn Museum, NY; The Andy Warhol Museum, PA; The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, CT; and the Gemeentemuseum, The Hague. His work is in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art, NY; National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Victoria and Albert Museum, London; Albright Knox Art Gallery, NY; and the New York Public Library, among others. An accompanying monograph of his flower series, Super- Modern Things, will be published in Fall 2026.
