Sebastiaan Bremer's 'To Joy' Series, Contemporary Fine Art, Leah Harmuth

Sebastiaan Bremer, 2012, To Joy: Nature's Bosom, archival inkjet, hand painting, and collage, 36 x 36 inches, edition of 10.

Sebastiaan Bremer's work originates from snap-shots taken by either him, friends or family, which Bremer enlarges. He keeps an archive of these personal photographs and sorts through them to find a suitable image. What is locked in Bremer's memory forms the ground work for each piece of his work.  
To Joy, a new four-part series released in collaboration with the Lower East Side Printshop (located in Midtown), is inspired by Friedrich Schiller's Ode to Joy. Here Bremer takes photographs from a family vacation in 1972, and presents the world as an idealized, peaceful, and optimistic place.

Sebastiaan Bremer, 2012, To Joy: Heavenly, Thy Sanctuary, archival inkjet, hand painting, and collage, 36 x 36 inches, edition of 10.

Bremer hand paints inkjet prints, embellishes with collages, cut-outs, and mirrored discs.  The resulting effect is whimsical, spontaneous, and uplifting.

Sebastiaan Bremer, 2012, To Joy: Universal Time Machine, archival inkjet, hand painting, and collage, 36 x 36 inches, edition of 10.

Born in Amsterdam in 1970, Sebastiaan Bremer relocated to Brooklyn, New York in 1992 after he received the Werkbeurs Grant from FBKVB in Holland.  His first solo show was in 2001, entitled Veronica, at Roebling Hall, New York.  He has since had numerous solo exhibitions in New York and internationally.  Bremer's work is in the permanent collections of The Victoria and Albert Museum, MoMA, the Berger Collection in Zurich, and the Rabobank Collection, in the Netherlands.

Sebastiaan Bremer, 2012, To Joy: The Good Spirit, archival inkjet, hand painting, and collage, 24 x 24 inches, unnumbered edition of 5.

For more information on the To Joy Series, contact the Lower East Side Printshop at info@printshop.org.  All images courtesy of Lower East Side Printshop.