BREST.- From the very beginning of his career, Daniel Gustav Cramer (1975, Germany) has divided his work between photography, video, sculpture and the writing of short texts, resulting in both exhibitions and the publication of books. Using landscape as a starting point (a turquoise sea, a pine forest, a mountain lake), the works of the German artist, born in 1975, take the form of micro-tales whose meaning gradually becomes clear through the succession of images.


Delve into the quiet beauty of Daniel Gustav Cramer's work. Browse our selection of his publications and experience his unique perspective.


The ‘Tales’ series, begun in 2000, is particularly representative of this approach, combining photographic sequences organised in diptychs, triptychs or larger groups of images. In each sequence, an ordinary landscape is photographed from a distance, generally featuring a discreet element somewhere in the scene. From one image to the next, this element moves or changes, thereby constituting the central thread of a story: a dog by the side of a road, watching the passers-by, a ray of sun glinting on snow-covered ground, a boat sailing over the water until it disappears out of the frame… The artist is showing man in his environment, showing how places are shaped by the people who live in them and pass through them and vice versa. Even without a human figure, the spectator is invited to perceive traces of activity, to imagine what is going on there, to imagine himself there.

In his photographs and in the texts and objects (sculptures, publications, etc.) which the artist sometimes exhibits with his images, he focusses on showing moments of suspension, caught just before something happens. He extends the time we are waiting, at the risk of interrupting the narrative, leaving in suspense the people photographed as well as the spectator looking at them. Time seems to have slowed down in his images, nothing seems to be really happening. Nothing remarkable, in any case. Yet out of this meagre resource there nevertheless comes a profusion of stories, presented in a fragmented way, and echoing each other, in the exhibition space.

The exhibition at Passerelle is the first such wide-scale presentation of the ‘Tales’ series, previously only shown extensively at the Vera Cortês gallery in Lisbon in 2014.

Daniel Gustav Cramer is an artist whose work notably defines itself through minimalist and radical spatial and visual compositions. Working mainly with installations, which he composes out of a wide range of elements and media, including photography, prints, writing or sculpture, Cramer has developed a significant and coherent body of work similar to an ever-growing archive of fragmented and fragile memories.

Recent solo exhibitions include ‘Two Works’ at Musée d’Aurillac, ‘Portraits’ at Vera Cortes, Lisboa, ‘Works’ at Kunsthalle Mulhouse, ‘Three Works’ at Documentahalle, Kassel, ‘Seventeen’ at Kunstverein Nürnberg, ’01-72’ at Salts, Biersfelden and “Three” at Tongewölbe t25, Ingolstadt.

His work has been recently included in group exhibitions including dOCUMENTA(13), Kassel, (DE); Artists Space, NYC; Cura, Rome, (It); NMNM Monaco, (MO); Palais de Tokyo, Paris, (FR); Piano Nobile, Geneva, (CH); Witte de With, Rotterdam, (Nl); IAC FRAC, Villeurbanne, (FR); Frankfurter Kunstverein, (DE); Mudam, Luxemburg, (lU); Renaissance Society, Chicago, (USA) and Museo Coleçao Berardo, Lisboa. Cramer self publishes books and collaborates with publishing houses, including upcoming projects with Yvon Lambert Bookshop as well as MOREpublishers, Quenast. Since 2008 he collaborates with Haris Epaminonda on The Infinite Library, an expanding archive of book works.

Currently, his work is shown at Manifesta 14, Pristina, Kosovo; Skovhuset, Værløse, Denmark; Misk Art Center, Saudi Arabia and Hua International, Berlin.

Daniel Gustav Cramer is represented by Sies + Höke in Düsseldorf, as well as by et Vera Cortês in Lisbonne.



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