Armand Bartos Fine Art is pleased to present its first solo artist exhibition, and David Kramer’s debut with the gallery. This show was inspired by a project archiving Kramer’s productive twenty-year career of art making. His practice began in the time-honored traditions of painting and sculpture, expanded to include the live performance of concrete poems, which further evolved into the text-based drawings that he is best known for. Kramer rounds out his art production as director, set designer and star of a number of videos, which has lead to the creation of elaborate gallery installations. This introductory survey reaches as far back as 1989 and presents a selection of work that highlights the radical, multi-disciplinary nature of Kramer’s creative process.

Using his own life as source material for his art, Kramer is the consummate storyteller. But like a movie star who we recognize from the roles that they play, and the stories we read in the tabloids, there is a disconnection between the man himself and the stage persona he has created. The character presented in his artwork is both an idealized and vilified version of himself, with the truth often stretched in service of the story.

Kramer’s experiences become the universal struggle of the everyman for greatness. He gets up and goes to work every day. He is married with a son. He struggles to make ends meet. And he often takes comfort at the end of the day in a bottle. The imagery in his work is culled from 1970s print advertising. Hot girls and big cars are symbols of having arrived. Cowboys are metaphors for the lonely and hardscrabble life of the artist. Modernist architecture creates space for better living. Cigarettes are eternally cool and represent an irrational love for things that may destroy us. Re-inscribing romanticized and highly stylized versions of the American Dream, Kramer explores our desire for halcyon days and the hangover of disappointment with a razor sharp wit.