Paul Kremer

Hopper 12 (paper study)

2018

Paul Kremer, born in 1971 in Chicago, is an American artist whose artwork references everything but performance art. Kremer uses traditional methods, working with acrylics on canvas or paper to achieve his distinctive style of painting. His artistic production oscillates between digitally printed meditations on the internet and massive color field abstractions. Art in America's Raphael Rubinstein describes Kremer's work as "bold compositions whose hard-edge, single-color shapes (generally red-orange, black, or white) oscillate between flat abstraction and illusionistic geometry, evoking monumental architecture as well as broken-off glacier sections." Rubinstein also writes, "Kremer's uninflected surfaces and smooth contours mark him as an heir of Ellsworth Kelly." New York-based art historian and curator Alex Bacon has written extensively on Kremer's work and has praised the artist's ability to combine abstraction with everyday familiarity: He writes, "Abstracting from familiar forms . . . enables Kremer to harness the sensations that arise from our day-to-day encounters." Kremer's work has also been referred to as “wonderfully freeing,” and Kremer's use of overlapping color fields has been likened to “Josef Albers-style color interactions.”