MOTI HASSON GALLERY is pleased to announce the representation of DAVID KRAMER. Please join us on Thursday, June 21, from 6-8 p.m. for a reception to welcome the artist to the gallery. Kramer will create a special project to coincide with the exhibition openings for Miriam Vlaming, Tommy Hartung and Rashawn Griffin. The artist will be in attendance.

DAVID KRAMER’s works on paper, painting, sculpture, video, film, performance, public art, and book works always give reason to pause for self-reflection. Infused with faulty brushwork, text, and his signature scrapbook aesthetic, Kramer uses his characteristic wit that borders on pathos to expose what the artist calls his ‘post-pop existential lament’.

“WHY IS IT THAT SO MUCH OF ONE’S LIFE CAN BE BOILED DOWN TO A FEW DEFINING MOMENTS WHEN I SPEND ALL OF MY TIME WAITING FOR THEM TO HAPPEN”

By telling jokes again and again in different ways, Kramer is not attempting to be redundant and to nullify the impact of his statements, but to reiterate the seriousness of what lies just beneath the surface. “Kramer’s quick-take humour reveals a darker side,” curator Joan Stebbins writes, “one that questions our society’s love affair with the superficial,” yet he remains a willing participant. In balancing the lure of seduction with the crudeness of reality, Kramer remains true to the optimism, desire and longing of believing in his artistic pursuits and in living out the American Dream—or at the very least, its representation through the media, and in particular 1970s advertising from Kramer’s youth that provides much of the source material for his work.

Ultimately, Kramer’s appeal lies in what curator and critic John Massier describes as the artist’s ability to “draw us into recognizing the inherent absurdity to the spectacle of life we are living and watching,” and in issuing statements-as-jokes, rather than diatribes to “describe moments of empathy with the viewer, an articulation of the familiar and sometimes ludicrous bond that connects us all.”

“ALL THINGS BEING EQUAL, I’M PREPARED FOR THE LONG HAUL. DOWN THE ROAD, I’M STILL GONNA BE HERE”

David Kramer (born 1963, New York. Lives and works in New York), received his Master of Fine Arts from the Pratt Institute in 1987. His work has been showcased widely across the United States and Canada through exhibitions, screenings, and performances at Aeroplastics Contemporary, Bard Center for Curatorial Studies, Birch/Libralato, Brooklyn Academy of Music, Brooklyn Museum, Feigen Contemporary, Galleria Traghetto, Hallwalls Contemporary Arts Center, Pierogi, Roebling Hall, Saidye Bronfman Centre for the Arts, SculptureCentre, and the Whitney Museum of American Art, among other venues. He has received numerous grants and awards for his work, as well as critical acclaim in Art: Review, The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Village Voice, and zingmagazine , among other publications. Kramer’s work is also held in various private and public collections.

The work of David Kramer can be viewed in numerous exhibitions throughout New York this summer, including The Story Goes at McKenzie Fine Art (June 7-July 28, 2007) and Ceci n’est pas… (This is not…) at Sara Meltzer Gallery (June 27-August 17, 2007), where he will also participate in a special evening of screenings on Thursday, July 19, at 8 p.m. Upcoming projects include solo exhibitions at Galleria Traghetto, Venice/Rome in August and at Moti Hasson Gallery, New York in May of 2008.