Peter Bremers is at SOFA Chicago

Sponsored by the Tel Aviv Litvak Gallery, Peter Bremers has once again shared his sculpture at SOFA Chicago.

Netherlands artist Peter Bremers was born in 1957 in Maastricht. He studied sculpture at the University of Fine Arts from 1976 to 1980, then three-dimensional design at the Jan van Eyck Academie from 1986 to 1988. Searching for suitable ways to realize his artistic ideas, he began to work with a wide range of materials, including glass, plastic, steel and stone. In 1989, he attended a course given by Lino Tagliapietra at the Gerrit Rietveld Academie in Amsterdam, but the strongest impetus to turn to glass as his ideal material had come three years earlier, during a workshop held at the Jan van Eyck Academie by the senior Dutch glass artist A.D. Copier (1901-1991).

Bremers works with a team of assistants who carry out his ideas at the furnace that the artist acquired on extensive travels in Asia, New Zealand, Africa and the Antarctic. Perhaps Bremers's most compelling works are the recentIcebergs & Paraphernalia. Inspired by the majesty and fragility of the changing Antarctic landscape, created the Icebergs & Paraphernalia series in kiln cast glass as an homage to the earth, to express respect and give thanks that such wonders still exist, despite human intervention. [image right: Icebergs & Paraphernalia 2007-119, 2007. 90 x 56 x 17 cm]

In a DVD documentation of this series he describes his journey to the Antarctic in a deep-sea sailing ship, recording his impressions of the glaciers and of the waves glistening in the dawn sunlight. He also tells of disastrous attempts to realise the resulting ideas at the furnace, and how he travelled to the Czech village of Pelechov, near Zelezny Brod, to have them cast instead. In Icebergs & Paraphernalia Bremers uses undulating wave-like shapes, along with angular holes and arches to evoke a combination of ice and fire, light and colour. He recreates in glass, openings and fissures in the glaciers, and succeeds at capturing an idea of the unfathomable depths of the ice.

Bremers's work is featured in the public collections of Boymans van Beuningen Museum in Rotterdam, The Netherlands; Gemeentemuseum in The Hague, The Netherlands and National Glassmuseum in Leerdam, The Netherlands.