Kurt Kramer

The Infeld House of Culture in Halbturn is celebrating its 20th anniversary this year. More than 100 exhibitions by well-known national and international artists, more than 100 concerts took place during this time. Admission for visitors is free.

In the anniversary year there is an exhibition with artworks by the Viennese artist Kurt Kramer (1945-2008). Color, tone and word were existential basic terms for Kramer's life. It was filled equally with painting, drawing, music and writing.

The artist wrote: "The deep meaning of art is to silently awaken the gift in people to experience the story of their own feelings."

The combination of strongly graphic, linear elements and painterly colored areas reaching to abstraction, as well as the play with realistic details in the midst of resolved forms are common to all of Kurt Kramer's works. His work cannot be clearly classified formally. Cubist, surreal and abstract approaches are often represented together in one picture.

Painting and composing, this idea fascinated Kurt Kramer like it did once Wassily Kandinsky. Just as Kandinsky understood "form" as a "score," music was also a major concern of the Viennese artist. Both were concerned equally with the question of "how do I get closer to music in the form of visual art?"
Kurt Kramer translated music into another dimension: He expressed it in line and color. The line gives the content a contour, the color creates the mood.

As much as Kurt Kramer subordinated himself to the dialog between form and color in his pictures, he often followed his need for expression and communication with poetic texts, expanding or priming his visual language. In a world of increasing alienation and isolation, he strove for a holistic whole as a subject of longing.

He described art as follows: "Art is just the thread that connects those of us who are standing on a factual ground, with the big dreams beyond the horizon: painting senses its colors and music makes this heavenly string sound."

In the 1970s and 1980s, Kurt Kramer developed slogans and advertising texts for Thomastik-Infeld and realized exhibition booths (e.g., for the Musikmesse in Frankfurt) for the company's presentations.
Kurt Kramer designed packaging for the strings from Thomastik-Infeld e.g., for the string "Dominant", which has been on the market for 50 years.     

Kurt Kramer would have been 75 this year.