2016 Poster Artist & Juror – Paul Kremer

Presented by
Jefferson County

Paul Kremer was born in 1971 and is an American artist who lives and works in Houston, Texas. His style can be described as a graphical interpretation of Color Field painting, an abstract style that emerged in New York City during the 1940s and 1950s; and Minimalism, which has its origins in various art and design movements. His work could be seen in numerous group and solo shows. A range of artworks is held in private collections around the cities of New York, Los Angeles, Miami, Houston, Austin, Aspen, Norfolk, Birmingham, Hong Kong, Cannes, Toronto, and Lima.

Paul Kremer was one of the founders of the artist collective “I Love You Baby”. Amongst other founding members such as Rodney Elliott and Will Bentsen, they started to meet weekly in 2002 at Commerce Street Artists’ Warehouse (CSAW). More artists joined the group including Chris Bexar, Dale Stewart, and many others.

In his visual art, Kremer uses traditional methods. He mainly works with acrylics on canvas to achieve his distinctive style of color field painting and Post-painterly abstraction.

Paul Kremer’s artistic production oscillates between digitally printed meditations on the internet, and massive zombie abstractions that have been compared to IKEA potholders. The Future is Ow features several of Kremer’s IMG_SRCH Paintings which consist of fragments of Google image searches printed out on canvas. Examples include Portage County,and Flavin Diagram, both of which titles are also the search terms used. Nowadays, Google searches are as familiar as breathing, but when hung on a wall for contemplation, the poetry of these assembled images becomes apparent. These works continue a tradition of arranging found mass-media imagery into meaningful compositions, a tradition that includes Joseph Cornell, Robert Rauschenberg and Dada collage. Another work of Kremer’s, Mock-up, comes out of his practice of creating images where famous works of art are photoshopped into inappropriate environments. These pictures are accumulated on his notorious site Great Art in Ugly Rooms. Mock-up shows one of Kremer’s abstractions posed monumentally in a museum interior. It speaks to the alarming blur between real success pictured on the net, and …fake pictures on the net.

– Bio provided by Artist

Featured Image on 2016 Magic City Art Connection Poster:
Paul Kremer
Hopper 2, 2015
Acrylic on Canvas
84×64 inches
Image courtesy of the artist and Peter Makebish Gallery NY, NY

To learn more about Paul Kremer and see other images of his artwork, click here.

Read an interview with Paul Kremer on Scandale Projects’ website. Click here.