About Ivan Cremer

Ivan Cremer, a sculptor, is the son of writer-artist Jan Cremer – guest curator of the ARTZUID, 2011 edition – and grandson of the architect Karel Sijmons, who designed the Thomaskerk in Amsterdam South, among other things. Ivan studied architecture at the Technical University in Delft. He ended his career as a successful architect in New York and Los Angeles to become a sculptor in Leipzig. In his works, he always looks for parallels between art, architecture, design and sculpture.

Cremer previously made a series of ballet dancers: Dancers from Oblivion. He chopped, ate, sanded, hammered and screwed his sculptures together from Italian waste wood from ruins. The birth of Apollo, the sculpture he made for ARTZUID 2019, is based on the choreography of George Balanchine.

He prefers to put all his works together himself. The steel plates he works with are not stainless. He suggests movement through the use of steel, trowels and serrated discs, which depict the heads of the dancers.

Every dancer, every muse stands on its own concrete pedestal. They represent nine divergent art disciplines: from song to poetry, which mutually influence each other and between which there is no hierarchy.