Haris Epaminonda & Daniel Gustav Cramer
Opening 22nd of January 2009, 6-8 pm
The exhibition by Haris Epaminonda and Daniel Gustav Cramer marks the final instalment of BolteLang’s series of two person presentations that commenced when the gallery opened in January 2008. BolteLang has already presented one volume of Epaminonda and Cramer’s collaborative work The Infinite Library at NADA Art Fair, Miami, in December 2008 and follows this with an exhibition of solo works which the artists have jointly curated.
Haris Epaminonda was born in 1980 in Nicosia, Cyprus. She studied in London at both undergraduate and postgraduate level, and there met Daniel Gustav Cramer at the Royal College of Art. Cramer, (born 1975 in Neuss, Germany) had studied in Münster before the Royal College. Although pursuing individual artistic practices, the two have worked closely since 2005. In recent years Cramer has received significant recognition for his Trilogy series of photographs, while Epaminonda’s works have been acquired by major collections such as that of Deutsche Bank
and Dakis Joannou. In 2008 the two artists began The Infinite Library, their second stated collaboration; this exhibition at BolteLang is, however, a selection of solo works which create a honed constellation of elements, functioning together formally and aesthetically.
At first glance Epaminonda and Cramer work in different methods. Epaminonda seeks dated publications showing other lives and places; these catalyse paper collages, videos and photographic works, which do not always alter, but make the found images anew. Cramer’s photography of landscape, experienced at first hand, creates rich surfaces with unfathomable subtlety of texture. Yet the artists share creative concerns and a common understanding of how pictures function. Cramer’s choice of where to take a photograph is as arbitrary as Epaminonda’s finding of source material, but both judge with rigorous deliberation the point they reach the sought-after frame.
This BolteLang exhibition contains paper works and photographs by Cramer and a series of polaroids by Epaminonda. Each constituent possesses its own logic and inherent potential; as a group, they offer a window into an alternative world, seen with concerned and hopeful eyes. The globe is too great and complex to be comprehended other than in abstract terms; Epaminonda and Cramer’s present their vision of our contradictory and unfathomable environment in images that delicately balance the symbolic and the formal.
There is no conceptual riddle to be solved here, but the artists’ instinctual attempt to enunciate a truth about the world as it could be.
Aoife Rosenmeyer
The exhibition runs from 23 January – 21 February 2009