David Kramer

...I'm The Boss of Me

February 25th - April 2nd 

Opening Reception February 25th 4 -6pm

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Freight+Volume is excited to announce David Kramer’s upcoming exhibition, “…I am the Boss of Me” opening February 25 with a reception from 4pm - 8pm.  Kramer's paintings are elegies of the absurd. In a world clenched in the teeth of futility in politics, the abject  disregard of science in favor of private interests, and "fake news" in all its forms, Kramer's work speaks with a brevity and clarity that assuages the troubled mind. 

The sheer fact that Kramer accomplishes this with humor and irony says less about the importance of his brand of concision, and more about how we tend to take matters that can only provoke confusion too seriously. While not eschewing a certain delight in chaos, Kramer's paintings selectively pick from the mediated detritus which that surrounds us. What results are works that are equally casual and graceful, accessible and transformative. His luscious brushstrokes and colors seem to be arrived at through solitary meditation. 

Part of Kramer's directness stems from his use of language. Placing text over an image, he not only ironically comments on what the image portrays, but takes it back from the anarchy of interpretations images are subject to in isolation. What comes out of this is a new pictorial connaissance. A complex of elements which combines image and meaning -  not in the manner of facile  sloganeering, but in a way that allows both text and artistry to breathe in their own atmosphere of ambiguity. 

Out of this comes humor stacked on top of seriousness. What's essential is that there's a choice; and that the choice is appreciable in its apparent ease. For instance, "I am the boss of me...and I notoriously don't pay well" reads one text on a painting in this show. What's at issue here is not the scale of the work, but the kind of slap-yourself-in-the-face humor that wraps itself around the painting like an armor. One can treat oneself badly or well; but however we choose to disrespect ourselves, what we do becomes habitual and public, whether we want to admit this or not. 

Another work features text that says: "...you don't want to know how the sausage gets made." Here, Kramer's hallmark of delivering a message to the viewer in medias res, as it were, really goes to work. Against a vermiculate black background — what was really being said that this clause is a continuance of? And, furthermore, are we not all sausages spaghettified in the threshing machine of life? Kramer claims we don't want to know any of this. Yet in this way he wryly makes us think of our own ends, and the meaning of the society around us.

David Kramer's work has been the subject of national and international solo exhibitions including Galerie Laurent Godin in Paris, France; Aeroplastics Contemporary in Brussels, Belgium; Pierogi in Brooklyn, NY; Owen James Gallery’ NY;Pollard + Mulherin Gallery in New York; Galerie Tanit (Munich and Beruit) and Birch Contemporary in Toronto. He is the recipient of the New York Foundation for the Arts Grant Fellowship and The Pollock-Krasner Foundation Fellowship. He also collaborated with Hedi Slimane on the Celine SS2020 Men’s Collection. David Kramer was born in NYC where he currently lives and works.