In 1998, during a residency at Skowhegan, in Maine, Dutch artist Sebastiaan Bremer both took a risk and made a discovery; he upended ingrained methodologies and jettisoned just about everything that had constituted a painting for him so far, including paintbrush, brush strokes, figures and scenes rendered in paint, canvas, stretcher bars and to a certain degree, paint itself. Instead, using Milky Pens and Pentel paint pens, Bremer began to apply white pointillist dotes and small blobs in rippling and swirling patterns to enlarged copies of photographs – either found family photographs or those taken by him – essentially to draw directly on photographs.
What resulted was a complex, fluid exchange between made marks and photographic image and between those marks and the photograph as an actual, physical artifact. What really began was an intricately human, searching, deeply personal response to, and transfiguration of, past situations and fleeting moments: the live, crackling, current mind operating on visual traces of the past, with all the sprawling thoughts, memories, and emotions they trigger.
Sebastiaan Bremer took the photographs that form the basis of his newest series, Ave Maria, 23 years ago when he was 23 years old and had just traveled to the United States from Amsterdam. Soon after moving to New York, he met and fell in love with Andrea Lerner (the Brazilian choreographer and half of the duo, chameckilerner) who would later become his wife. Sebastiaan took several photographs that day of Andrea in the bathtub in their East Village apartment. Now, in an exhibition at Edwynn Houk Gallery in New York, he revisits these images as an exploration into the effect of time on the couple’s relationship and their individuality.
Sebastiaan Bremer, Ave Maria
3 May – 24 June 2017
Edwynn Houk Gallery
745 5th Ave #407
New York, NY 10151
USA
