Sebastiaan Bremer: To Joy

Contemporary artist Sebastiaan Bremer produces works that explode with energy as his obsessively-painted white dots rise over his photographic canvases like clouds of smoke. In this title, Bremer's personal writings are like an intimate studio visit of his artistic practice.

Charlotte Cotton, esteemed independent writer and curator, presents an essay outlining the importance of Bremer’s contribution to contemporary photography.

Gregory Volk, an art critic for Art in America and professor at Virginia Commonwealth University, poetically describes the emergence of Bremer’s unique work in Williamsburg, Brooklyn in the 1990s.

“This concentrated period of practice and critique was truly the beginning of Bremer’s explorations of the ideas that continue to sustain his work, the point at which he first delved into the substance of photographic space and added his subjectivity into it through the material of paint. Rather than the paint being a screen that overlaid a photographic, real-time prompt, Bremer’s intense application of pigment became the vital animation of a photographic visualisation of a past moment. The labour of Bremer’s small pointillist marking on photographic surfaces for the first time became a fully fledged annotation of what was passing through his mind, something that had deep connections to his way of expressing himself in his formative years but now self-consciously harnessed into his artistic practice.”

Extract from Charlotte Cotton's essay