Roebling Hall is extremely pleased to present the newest exhibition of drawings on photographs by Sebastiaan Bremer, densely layered, unabashedly romantic, large-scale paeans to love, death, beauty and roiled, conflicted consciousness which significantly up the ante on this artist?s well-known visual intensity.

Gorgeously ambitious, Bremer?s current crop of visual-poetic analogies literally draw from the well of his Dutch heritage, while pushing his characteristic imagery and scale into a realm rich in history and raw emotion. Tipping his hat to the titans of Dutch painting, Bremer layers meticulously drawn detail (some of it culled from the still life paintings of Rembrandt, Golzius, Jan Vonck, Gerrit dou and others) over blurry photographic backdrops taken from more modern sources, including found snapshots and family photos. Admixing old master vanitas portraits with personal and collective memory, Bremer?s drawings create a substantial vortex in time, personal history, art history, the history of ideas and History itself, which he then blends together into labyrinths of dots, figures and landscapes fixed lastingly on film.

Often intensely personal in subject matter, Sebastiaan Bremer?s drawings never fail to strike a universal chord. In Ilha das Cobras (Revisited), for example, Bremer returns to an image on which he worked just before the birth of his son. Today, with the birth of an infant daughter, he compounds the drawing?s complexity by adding new washes of Technicolor hues while refashioning an already imaginary, highly mystical landscape into a profusely lush, Bruegelian Garden of Eden, which recalls both 60s psychedelia as well as Courbet?s The Origin of the World.

In another work titled Self-portrait in Studio, Bremer encircles a blurred figure that resembles a young Rembrandt with gnarly branches, a dead hare, a pitcher, a chair and other elements of Dutch still life. Though the figure is obviously outfitted in contemporary garb, the drawing transports him back into the 16th century and forward again, traveling through several parallel universes that are intricate, frankly beautiful and always suggestive of mysterious worlds both present and just beyond our reach.

Sebastiaan Bremer has exhibited in, among other venues, The Gemeentemuseum Den Haag in the Hague; The Tate Modern, London; The Victoria & Albert Museum, London; PS 1 Contemporary Art Center, New York; The Brooklyn Museum of Art; The Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art, Upcoming shows in 2006/7 include Hales Gallery, London, and The Photograph as Canvas at The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum.

For further information or images, please contact the gallery at or visit roeblinghall.com.