Patrick Bremer’s artwork is a unique blend of portraiture and collage art, which makes sense judging by his background. Born in Brighton in 1982, and currently based in Berlin, Bremer studied painting at Wimbledon College of Art in London and is a recipient of The DeLazlo Foundation Award for his portraiture from The Royal Society of Portrait Painters.
“I always loved painting and I grew up in a very artistic family, my father being a painter and art teacher,” he explained in a piece he wrote for Artsy Shark. “I also remember being really influenced by seeing lots of the old Derek Riggs Iron Maiden album covers when I was little, as my sister was seeing a guy who was obsessed with them – the color and imagery in those was like nothing I’d ever seen before and has remained a pull to art ever since for me.”
But though his roots were in classical painting, his creative path eventually took him to collage art.”I ended up doing collage out of circumstance,” he admits. “I am lucky to have a good studio, but in the winter months it is so cold in there that I wanted to find a way of working at home in the evenings, but without destroying the house with paint. I had a pile of old magazines so I began cutting them up and the first one I finished was of my nephew (George). Since then they have been growing larger and more experimental, getting freer with the knife each time and trying to treat them in my mind as paintings or drawings.”
What began as a playful experimentation with an old pile of magazines would soon turn into a full-time gig. “I love the exploration involved with collage work,” says Bremer. Some of his pieces within each work are chosen specifically because the image or text relates to the sitter, while others are left to chance. “The pictures work on the first level as a portrait, but then you can move closer to explore and read the information within it,” he says.
Take a closer look:
