Exactly the Same… Only Different

Satchel Projects is pleased to present Exactly the Same… Only Different, a solo exhibition of recent works by New York–based artist David Kramer. Known for his wry, deadpan text-and-image-based paintings and textiles, David Kramer’s work skewers the excesses of contemporary American life. Exactly the Same… Only Different brings together paintings, sculptural furniture, and wall-hung hook rugs that collectively form a satirical portrait of aspiration, nostalgia, and self-mythologizing. Mining vintage print magazines and contemporary social media imagery, Kramer has developed a pop vocabulary of banal yet seductive forms. Paired with deceptively clichéd but carefully chosen phrases and idioms, image and text reflect and refract one another, generating layered and open-ended meanings. In recent works on paper, Kramer deploys text both directly and indirectly, sometimes eliminating it entirely from the painting and shifting it into the title. These wordless paintings depict obsolete, “muted” carriers of information: a manual typewriter, a rotary phone, an early model PC. In 2016, Kramer began experimenting with handmade hook rugs in parallel with his text-based paintings. In this labor-intensive process, burlap is stretched across a frame and acrylic yarn in bright pop hues is pulled through the weave. Multiple strands are often combined within a single loop, producing optical blends of color. The resulting “soft tondos” are hung unstretched on the wall, still attached to their burlap grounds. As “plush paintings,” the hook rugs collapse distinctions between fine art and craft, grounding Kramer’s text and imagery in a tactile vernacular that both complicates and subtly reframes their meaning. Kramer arrived at his current multidisciplinary practice intuitively and for practical reasons. In his early video work, he constructed his own sets, and to this end he taught himself to make upholstered furniture. The daybed and ottoman in Exactly the Same… Only Different function as both sculpture and a place to sit to view the wall-hung works. Hook rugs were likewise a natural extension of the prop-making process, and evolved to became another way to make a painting. Cultural attitudes are often expressed through everyday imagery; David Kramer decodes popular visual language and coaxes out the ideas concealed within it. On its surface Kramer’s work reads as commentary, but beneath its irreverent veneer it reveals itself to be deeply personal and gently self-mocking. As history stumbles forward (or backward), the meanings in these works likewise kaleidoscopically shift, and new relevancies come to light. David Kramer was born in New York City, where he currently lives and works. A recipient of fellowships from the Pollock-Krasner Foundation and the New York Foundation for the Arts, Kramer has exhibited widely in the United States and abroad. His work has been featured at leading contemporary art fairs, including Art Basel and The Armory Show, and is held in public collections such as the Museum London (London, Ontario), the Musée National d’Art Moderne, Centre Pompidou (Paris), and the Lower East Side Printshop (New York), among others. His videos and performances have been presented at the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Centre Pompidou, the Brooklyn Museum, and Midway Contemporary Art. Kramer’s work has been discussed in Vogue, The New Yorker, New York Magazine, Artforum, Artnews, Artnet, British GQ, Esquire, The New York Times, and The Globe and Mail (Canada). He has collaborated with Celine and Hedi Slimane on the Men’s SS2020 line and has contributed to The New York Times Opinionator section. Kramer received his MFA from Pratt Institute, Brooklyn, and his BA from The George Washington University, Washington, DC.

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