Artist's Reception: Saturday, April 18, 3-5 pm
Edwynn Houk Gallery is pleased to announce Super Modern Things, an exhibition of new works by Sebastiaan Bremer. The artworks — which combine photography and painting — continue the artist's long-standing exploration of flowers and the layered histories and concerns embedded in still lifes, including questions of beauty, mortality, value, ecology, and global exchange.
Each artwork begins with a historical source image, from seventeenth-century Dutch botanical catalogues or Golden Age still life paintings. Bremer photographs these reproductions, bringing their layered histories into new focus: global trade, speculation, mortality, and the long symbolic life of the flower. From there, he draws and paints in ink and acrylic — dots, lines, stains, and washes of pigment, each mark both intentional and intuitive. Together, they form rhythms across the image that suggest the intangible: language, musical notation, emotion, pollination, or constellations.The works unfold slowly, and over time, the image shifts and new relationships emerge.
Bremer's appropriation and transformation of these sources is both historically engaged and deeply personal. On one hand, the works raise questions the Dutch masters encoded in flowers centuries ago, which Bremer's works insist remain urgently active today: What is the true value of beautiful things, and who pays? How does beauty function as power? What do we choose to preserve — and now that some have decided death itself is a problem to be solved, what becomes of everything generations built around accepting its inevitability? On the other hand, the painted surface is an intimate record of his attention, memory, and time — the images and titles are drawn from books he has carried with him for years, the slow accumulation of marks as much diary as art history.
An accompanying monograph of his flower series will be published in Fall 2026.
Sebastiaan Bremer (b. 1970, Amsterdam) lives and works in New York. His work is held in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; the Victoria and Albert Museum, London; the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo; and the New York Public Library, among others. It has been exhibited at Tate Modern, London; MoMA PS1, New York; the Brooklyn Museum; The Andy Warhol Museum; The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum; and the Gemeentemuseum Den Haag. Super Modern Things is his seventh exhibition with the gallery.
