April 10 to May 22, 2016

Nick Kramer

Spirit Baby

The Pit is pleased to announce Spirit Baby, a solo exhibition by Los Angeles based artist Nick Kramer in our second gallery, The Pit II. An opening reception will be held on Sunday April 10 from 4-7 pm and will remain on view until May 22. installation images below

For Spirit Baby, Kramer has created a new body of polyester resin sculptural wall reliefs encrusted with bright colors and playfully abstract forms that bring to mind signifiers from the biological realm such as cells, peanuts, eggs, or internal organs.

A Risograph printed publication designed by the artist with an essay by Stuart Krimko has been created to accompany Kramer’s Spirit Baby and will be available at the opening.

“Perhaps more important than any of the single materials that constitute them is the fact that they are forms through which and onto which a variety of materials flow.  These include paint and foil in addition to insulation foam and the aforementioned resin.  As such, they are neither paintings nor sculptures nor collages, though they draw freely and wantonly from the modern history of all of those genres.  They represent their own hybrid typology, one whose roots can be found in an idiosyncratic array of experiments by artists like Jean Dubuffet, Joan Miró, and Elizabeth Murray in which good-natured pathos rules the day…

… Kramer's work reflects the uneasy relationship between industry and biology in a world whose technological promise enables life even as it pollutes it.  The toxic qualities of the resin he employs are not lost on him, and its sick-making potential not only informs the shapes of the objects––cellular 'peanuts' and blob-like metastases predominate––but provides what amounts to an ethical challenge: how do we make beauty in and for an increasingly menacing physical environment?  And yet the objects, with their punchy colors and cartoonish contours, are as celebratory as they are funereal.”

-Excerpt from Stuart Krimko’s essay