UK based artist Patrick Bremer is best known for his contemporary, mixed-media collage art. Born in Brighton in 1982, and currently based in Devon, Bremer was originally trained to be a painter and has studied painting at Wimbledon College of Art in London.
But while working as a painter, he started experimenting with collage as a medium due to the price of paint and the medium’s convenience. His exploration began with a pile of National Geographic magazines, as he gradually moved onto more experimental collage work, treating paper as though it was his color palette and composing images out of strips of colored paper.
These days, Bremer’s work predominantly focuses on the figure and portraiture in a collage. “People and figures have always been part of my work for as long as I can remember,” he explains. “The move into collage [art] happened when I was teaching art. Before collages, I was working in heavy impasto oil and I was in between studios at the time so the convenience of collage was also a factor, it was a lot less messy.”
According to Bremer, working with paper has a similar feel to paint as he tries to use the knife in a similar way to a paintbrush. “I cut shapes that feel like streaks of wet paint,” he explains his process. Pieced together from stories and images from books picked up at the local market, Bremer’s portraits are meant to look shattered if somewhat messy.
Having won the DeLazlo Award from the Royal Society of Portrait Painters for his figurative work, Bremer has exhibited in a number of exhibitions throughout Europe and South Korea and has also led a range of workshops in collage, including one at the V & A Museum as part of the “This is Bowie” exhibition. He also regularly creates collage illustrations for magazines such as The New Yorker and Der Spiegel.
Scroll down to see some of his work:
