Daniel Gustav Cramer

Daniel Gustav Cramer’s current exhibition is an elegantly articulate overview of his output from the past decade, and it offers an intense visual experience through its contemplative atmosphere. The show begins with the Berlin-based artist’s latest video, which is installed in a wide, dark room near the museum’s transparent entrance. Orrery, 2012, is a slow montage of texts and images that convey the story of Cramer’s visits to Melbourne and meetings with a hermitlike man who builds eighteenth-century mechanical devices to study the planets’ paths around the sun. Almost still, the work seems to suspend time, and it brings the viewer to the heart of Cramer’s constellation of artistic concerns, knitting abstraction with intimacy, archive with individual memory, science with mysticism.

In another section of the show, “Works,” Cramer has assembled a heterogeneous gathering of photographs, videos, sculptures, installations, publications, and works on paper. Associating images of ancient landscapes as in Untitled (Stonehenge) with a video focusing on the surface of a crater (Untitled [Crater]) and a book made of pages of pure colors (Untitled [Colour]) (all 2009), these pieces display Cramer’s expert use of diverse materials and shapes to compose a precise, geometric, and refined “atlas” to be physically experienced.

“The Infinite Library,” Cramer’s collaborative project with Haris Epaminonda, is presented on the lower level and proposes to go deeper into the artist’s world of references. This section is a spectacular display of unique books, precious sculptural objects made with pages from antique publications, which the artists have been meticulously crafting since 2007. They are inspired equally by Warburgian iconology and Jorge Luis Borges’s utopias.