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. In the Antarctic, says Peter, some rocks seemed “to have been cut by the wind in an optic manner… Slowly melting in the sun, ice drips in the sea showing all of the colours of the rainbow.” “What a thrill to be amidst all this beauty which I soak as a sponge, filling me with ideas, excitement and gratitude.”
Bathed in the bluish tones and silver light of icy landscapes, the scenery exude a beautiful atmosphere of purity. “In the Antarctic, nature is so incredible, so overwhelming…», says Peter. Every day brought new surprises. “I watch an albatross skim over the tips of the waves in the first light of dawn and I wonder what beauties this new day will bring.” “There is a tranquillity here that is incomparable to any other place… It must be the total lack of human presence, apart from ourselves, that is perceptible here and it’s extraordinary indeed.”
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.