Konrad Kramer, Zabriskie Gallery, New York - Experimental Photography from the 1930s, 40s, and 50s

Konrad Kramer: Experimental Photography from the 1930s, 40s, and 50s
Zabriskie Gallery, New York
June 18 - August 3, 2001

Zabriskie presents the first gallery exhibtion exclusively devoted to the photographic work of KONRAD CRAMER (1888-1963). Recognized primarily as a Modernist painter who synthesized prevailing Cubist theories with an American sensibility, Konrad Cramer is most known for pastoral canvases that were variants of abstraction and representation. His photographs retain this "indigenous" aesthetic. In silver prints dating from the 1930s, 40s, and 50s, he experimented with various techniques and printing methods that resulted in luminous effects such as solarizations of still-lifes, nudes, and layered abstractions of recognizable objects.

Konrad Cramer was born in Wurtzburg, Germany and influenced early on by the Munich Expressionists, more commonly known as the "Blaue Reiter" (Blue Rider), the avant-garde group founded by Wassily Kandinsky. He began his distinguished career after moving to America in 1911, having married an American art student. 

By 1913, he had established himself with a pioneering series of abstract paintings, rendering in a loose, free-flowing style using oil, watercolor, and ink. After the first world war, his style evolved into a Cubist-derived aesthetic, combining the flat, multi-angled geometry of synthetic Cubism with old master techniques and classically-rescusitated theories such as Hambridge's neo-Greek formulations. His interest in photography was effected by his friendship with Alfred Stieglitz and other Modernists, in whose progressive circle he also traveled. 

After the disillusionment brought on by the Depression of the thirties, and with the advent of the handheld Leica camera in 1934, Konrad Cramer turned more seriously to photography. In the 1940s he took numerous exposures of nudes and still-lifes, capturing them in both a direct and manipulated manner - usually through tinting, photogram, and solarization. Some of Konrad Cramer's abstractions from the 1950s were produced by placing crumpling cellophane between two polaroid lenses, a mixture that imparted a layered and refracted quality to the images, breaking up space and relining planes to create a depth dimension, thus altering spatial perception and revisiting the Cubist aesthetic.

Having divided his time between Manhattan and Woodstock, it was at the latter where Konrad Cramer later founded and directed the Woodstock, New York Art Association and the Woodstock School of Painting. By combining the idyllic elements of a rural landscape with the urban vitality of New York City, he successfully fashioned an individualized view of the American experience. 

Zabriskie Gallery exclusively represents the estate of Konrad Cramer.

ZABRISKIE GALLERY
41 East 57 Street, New York, NY 10022
www.zabriskiegallery.com