WIEBKE KRAMER   

BORN: Hamburg, Germany - 1936

Lives and works in Germany

 

ABOUT THE ARTIST

Christian Hohmann | Fine Art is proud to present the extraordinary paintings of Wiebke Kramer. Although Wiebke Kramer has been an artist all her life and has sold a certain genre of her work, these paintings represent her very personal memoirs and feelings about her upbringing during WWII and the catharsis of her childhood encounters of everyday horrors of war. It has taken us several years to convince the artist to show these very striking and personal works to the public and make them available to private and public collections. In 2010 the Military Museum in Muenster, Northern Germany, honored her work in the most comprehensive retrospective so far.

 

BIOGRAPHY

1936                      born in Hamburg, Germany

1956                      graduation followed by a study program at Cambridge

1956–1960            studies visual arts at the University Hamburg

1960-1964             State Exams

1960-1977             Teaches art at public high schools

1975-83                 Published in various art publications

1979 to present     Associate Professor of Art at Public Universities

 

SELECTED EXHIBITIONS

1970    Art House Golombek, Hamburg

1975    City Hall of Kiel

            City Hall of Hannover

            City Hall of Hameln

1980    Galerie Club Vitatop, Hamburg

1985    Schoener Wohnen Galerie, Hamburg

1988    AOK, Hamburg

1989    Texaco AG., Hamburg

            Esso AG., Hamburg

1990    Vocational College Reinbeck

1994    City Center Moelln

1995    ENEG, Hamburg

1999    Reinbek Castle

2000    St. Trinitatis, Hamburg

2004    Mikado AG, Hamburg

2005    Erotic Art Museum

2008    The Hart Gallery, Palm Desert

2010    Military Museum, Muenster

2011    Nord Art, Buedelsdorf

 

THE FLOWERS OF LIFE BLOOM RED

In the pictorial world of Wiebke Kramer, we are confronted with a confirmed loner, a sensitive artistic personality who is seriously out of touch with our times and to whom nothing is as important as her work and artistic creations.

Her paintings take us along on her travels toward humanity and toward ourselves. The human being is the general theme of her work; the human being as a single entity and as walking alone, but also the human being in its relationship to others to whom it is tied through emotion, sympathy, love or hate or sometimes, simply by accident, time and space.

With these paintings, you can identify time and space exactly.  We look back to the years of WWII, the childhood of the artist and to concrete locations, such as the parental home, the gardens and landscapes of her past.  Pieces of these memories are translated into today’s world and confronted with the present.  The child in the paintings seems to knowingly insist on its innocence.

No doubt, Wiebke Kramer cannot rid herself of the images of her past; she is looking for answers to questions about that time, can’t understand how it was possible to be kept safe and harmless during her childhood when other children’s  lives were threatened and the world was going down in flames.  There is the young girl with a bouquet of roses in her hands flashing a happy smile at us, even though the world is shattered and in ruins all around her.

The discrepancy between substantive and actual realities could not be more forcefully expressed in these paintings.  The childhood memories of German Romanticism, of Goethe’s Germany in which the spirit of the child was raised and now finds itself in the rubble landscape of her home.

Although Wiebke Kramer orients her painting in her own life story, it would only be a half truth to interpret these works as merely the process of self exploration and therapy.   It is rather an apotheosis of Life itself.

Every life, every happy moment, every yearning for harmony is accompanied by the stigma of transience.  Life is not without thoughts of death nor is love.  The color red as a symbol for love and blood becomes the symbol of life itself.  It dominates the pictorial works of Wiebe Kramer and thus becomes the essence of her art.  Her own experience and vision is expanded to the deeper layers of consciousness and into the realm of dreams.  In creating new works of art, reality gains a surprising and strange expression that has nothing to do with surrealism and unreal realities.  This is the work of someone deeply affected by the “fragile state of the world” and who utilizes her work to look for the truth behind the reality and to depict it.  The truth is in life itself and not in the pictures we paint of it. And it is the truth of the simple as well as the extraordinary cycle of being, of creation and extinction, of birth, love and death