Dutch artist Peter Bremers was born in 1957 in Maastricht, where he studied sculpture at the University of Fine Arts from 1976 to 1980 and three-dimensional design at the Jan van Eyck Academie from 1986 to 1988. Searching for suitable ways of realising his artistic ideas, he at first worked 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 ideas at the furnace that the artist has acquired on extensive travels in Asia, New Zealand, Africa and the Antarctic. Perhaps Bremers's most compelling works are the recent Icebergs & Paraphernalia. 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 the openings and fissures in the glaciers, together with the unfathomable depths of the ice.
A visit to Arizona in 2008 changed not only his personal life, as he met his muse Janet there. The Canyons and Deserts of The Four Corners also inspired him to a new body of work by the same title. To him it was a logical step to go from the cold transparent ice to the hot density of the desert`s rocks and mountains. The artist carries this concept of bringing together the profane and the celestial into all his creations. The sculptures are often quiet and introspective, with series like 7 Bodies, Perception, Transformation and more recently Positive Space and Initiations. His latest series is called Vibrations. Everything that holds energy is in flux and vibrates. Vibrations can be slow, as currents in water and wind, or fast like light or high pitch sound. Making forms that make energy visible in static sculpture, the artist uses the symbolism of waves in lines and volumes, regular or irregular, enhancing, or disturbing, growing or calming, interfering or meditative.
Bremers has taught and exhibited around the world, from the Europe to Australia, Africa, China, and North American. His art is included in numerous collections including: the National Glass Museum (Leerdam, Netherlands); the Dutch Ministry of Justice (London, England); the Kunstgewerbe Museum (Berlin, Germany); the Palm Springs Art Museum (CA); and the National Liberty Museum (Philadelphia, PA). He has had solo and group exhibitions in the Netherlands, France, Germany, Switzerland, the United States, Australia, Israel, Italy, Canada, Dubai, the Czech Republic, China, and Taiwan. Among other public commissions, he has done installations on the Queen Mary II and at the “Murano” Glass Hotel in Tacoma, WA.
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