Arno Kramer

Galway Arts Centre invites you to the opening of two new exciting exhibitions at 6pm on Thursday 3rd December. Anita Murphy, a Galway based artist will present a collection of photographs entitled Bathers: 365 in Gallery 2 and Dutch artist Arno Kramer will be exhibiting a new body of work entitled BREATHRHYME in Gallery 1.

Arno Kramer lives and works in Broekland, a small village in the eastern part of the Netherlands and also works in Ireland. He exhibits regularly in galleries and museums in Holland and has also had solo exhibitions in the USA, England, Ireland (Green on Red Gallery, Dublin, Ormeau Baths Gallery, Belfast, Limerick City Gallery of Art, Model Arts and Niland Gallery Sligo, Roscommon Arts Centre), Germany and Sweden.

His last Irish exhibition, TOUCHES in the Green on Red Gallery in Dublin, featured drawings from 2008. Kramer had presented a series of small drawings and some small site specific works as well. In his recent works there is a huge variety of subjects. Animals like hares, swans, and deer are related to human, female bodies or to fragments of the Irish landscape. He has a lot of interest in the development of contemporary drawing. He is the curator of a huge show called Into Drawing Contemporary Dutch Drawings which was presented in the Limerick City Gallery of Art in 2005 and which travels through Europe to five countries. 

Since 1995 he has been invited to Ireland several times as an Artist in Residence.
After his first experience as an Artist in Residence in Ireland, he is very much inspired by Irish Poetry and by a photograph he once saw in the Irish Times from a shop with Christian-dresses. He has used the image of dresses a lot in his work in relation to parts of the human body, hands, feet, etc.

There is clarity in the way the work is made, but in its composition and combining of images, there is an enigmatic character and an almost mystical element to the work. It seems to be important that there is a certain tension and resistance in subjects and technique. By using watercolors and different drawing materials, like charcoal, pencil and pastel, he searches for sensibility in the images. Layer upon layer he works on an image, until it has the enigma he wants. He almost always works on paper and even though some of his last drawings are very colourful and less linear, he still calls his work drawings.