Artist’s Reception: Friday, July 1, 5:30 – 7:30pm
Lecture: Wednesday, June 29, 6 – 7pm

LewAllen Galleries is pleased to announce its upcoming exhibition, Peter Bremers: Points of Ascent, on view at our downtown venue July 1 – 31, 2011. The exhibition constitutes the gallery’s first solo presentation of works by Peter Bremers—an influential Dutch artist celebrated for translating the experience of extreme landscapes into the foundation for his internationally recognized glass sculptures. Offering additional insight into his artistic practice, Bremers will present a lecture at LewAllen Galleries on Wednesday, June 29, 2011.

Inspired by a journey he undertook to the Antarctic in a deep-sea sailing vessel, the kiln-cast glass works that constitute his Icebergs & Paraphernalia series concretize the artist’s recollections of the region’s passing swells and ice floes. Merging undulating wave-like shapes with angular holes and arches, the compositions recall both the fissures of melting glaciers and the unfathomable depths of ice gliding below the sea’s surface.

Characterized by rich earth-hued glass, angular structures, and intricately cut channels, the works in Bremers’s recently developed Canyons & Deserts series essentialize and evoke the austere and awe-inspiring landscape formations of the American Southwest. Using gestures of the hand to approximate the visual effects of erosion and stratification, the series proposes a dynamic contrast between human and geologic time.

Bremers was born in 1957 in Maastricht, The Netherlands, 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 manifesting his artistic ideas, his early works explored a broad range of materials, including glass, plastic, steel and stone. His impetus to fully adopt glass as the medium ideally suited to his aesthetic and conceptual intent was motivated by a 1986 workshop held at the Jan van Eyck Academie by the senior Dutch glass artist A.D. Copier (1901-1991) and was profoundly reinforced by a course taught by Lino Tagliapietra at the Gerrit Rietveld Academie in Amsterdam in 1989.

Now recognized as one of the world’s leading glass artists, his work is included in the permanent collections of such significant public institutions as the Kunstgewerbe Museum, Berlin, the Boymans van Beuningen Museum, Rotterdam, and the Museo de Arte Vidrio Mava, Madrid, among numerous others.

For additional information and images, please contact Alex Ross by phone at (505) 988-3250 or via email at [email protected].

www.lewallengalleries.com