BASEL CH: Hales Gallery is please to present Sebastiaan Bremer at the Solo Show 2008.

Hales Gallery is please to present Sebastiaan Bremer at the Solo Show 2008.

On show will be a new body of work made in direct response to works held in the collection of LACMA (The Los Angeles County Museum), USA.

The works are a result of a series of studies for a large commission for the institution which will be on show at the museum later this year. Each piece represents a continuous train of thought and interactivity with the collection over the past 18 months.

Many of the other works derive from one of two sources, both from the Golden Age of Dutch painting. The first is the Dutch Vanitas still life and the second is the Dutch enthusiasm for sea paintings. Bremer comments: 'The Dutch Vanitas paintings and other Dutch Golden Age works are for me (besides their individual meanings to be found in each work) also a depiction of a decadent culture at its highest and most rarefied and strange. It seems we are at the end of western culture's world dominance and the whole iconography we are used to and take as a given is really quite odd.'

The central work is entitled 'Hobbema's Pentagon Sojourn in the grass', as the title suggests is based on two Hobbema landscape paintings on view in the museum.

The Hobbema pieces began life as pendants, which at some time in their history were separated and have been reunited in the LACMA collection.

Bremer has reproduced these landscapes in part, over an accidentally triple exposed vintage photograph of his family relaxing in the late 60s. Bremer enlarged this image and then began to hand work with pen and ink on the surface.

He also drew on the resemblance between this image and Manet's Le déjeuner sur l'herbe. Bremer says 'I superimposed parts of both works (Hobbema's landscapes) onto the photo, which makes a nice circle as it were. The three exposures from the family photo plus the two landscapes make five in all, which is where I got the pentagon in the title from. Sojourn in the grass is from the resemblance to the Manet painting. No nakedness though, it's a family work after all!'

Sebastiaan Bremer lives and works in New York.

LOCATION

Voltahalle
Voltastrasse 27
4056 Basel
Switzerland

www.voltahalle.ch


DATES AND HOURS

Monday June 2
VIP Preview: 11 AM-2 PM
Opening Preview: 2 PM-4 PM
General admission: 4 PM-8 PM

Tuesday June 3
General admission: 11 AM-8 PM

Wednesday June 4
Directors and Curators: 11 AM-1 PM
General admission: 1 PM-8 PM

Thursday-Saturday June 5-6-7
General admission: 11 AM-8 PM

Sunday June 8
General admission: 11 AM-6 PM


ADMISSION

10 euro - 15 CHF