Sebastiaan Bremer (1970)
The personal and the fantastic: Sebastiaan Bremer unites them in his work, drawing over photographs from his own past with thin, spidery lines and tiny, meandering dots. Some are immediately recognisable, and we see a childhood friend of the artist, the artist's family on holiday or his grandmother's living room.* In others, the drawn layer has the upper hand and we must make do with the details we can see: an eye, or perhaps the naked shoulders of a girl. Bremer breaks through the transitory nature of the snapshots by creating a timelessness in his drawings. It is a blend of vague, wrinkled shapes and recognisable fragments. A row of arches, birds or an open window amid veil-like dot structures enveloping the subject of the photo. Bremer's hybrid technique makes his works rich in detail, from very close up to very far off.
Dutch Bremer began his career in New York, where he has lived and worked since 1998. His work was first shown in the Netherlands in the Rabo Art Collection exhibit H x B x D in the Gemeentemuseum in The Hague (2005).
* G. Volk, ‘The more you look, the more you see’, Sebastiaan Bremer:Monkey Brain, Berlin 2003, p.
