Naomie Kremer: Different Strokes
October 7 - 31, 2023
Opening Reception: Saturday, October 7, 6 – 8 pm

Octavia Art Gallery is pleased to present Naomie Kremer: Different Strokes. This is the third solo exhibition at the gallery for the artist. 

In this new body of work, Kremer continues to explore and celebrate the physical experience of being, juggling eros, flora, fauna, and saga in abstract relationships that continue to surprise.  Some of the tools are "new." Ruined old brushes and a variety of scrubbers from hardware stores provide novel ways of putting paint on canvas. Always pushing the boundary of "the tyranny of the mark, the handwriting" Kremer has accomplished this in the past with strategies such as masking and rubber stamping. Now, different tools bring their own idiosyncratic qualities of mark making, expanding the vocabulary with "different strokes." On these canvases, patterns emerge from the coalescence of chance events.

Murmuration, the largest painting in the exhibition, came about organically using these new tools. The hybrid version of Murmuration, reduced in scale, introduces a video of the painting animated and projected on its surface. Kremer's hybrid works bring together the analog and the digital in a form that can only be experienced in person. The experience doesn't resolve into familiarity: front projected, these paintings glow as though backlit. The surface remains elusive. For Kremer, this ambiguity captures a deep truth about reality.

Loopy II conjures an underwater world of creatures and grasses conversing in a symbolic language.  It brings the experience of not just seeing, but being in nature, with fluid rhythms and nuanced shades. Lithosphere, with its vectors and striations, evokes geological processes in the formation of the earth's crust, glowing with the plasticity of heat and pressure.

Two video works, Oodles and Inklinks, are constructed from painting details, photographed and choreographed in a dance of detail and texture, the visual equivalent of a musical composition.

“My work always has a fractal quality.” Kremer says. "From the galactic to the microscopic, there’s a visual relationship.”  Kremer’s paintings, hybrids, and digital works appear different each time they’re experienced, like the natural world itself.

Naomie Kremer was born in Israel and currently maintains studios in Berkeley, California and Paris, France. She received her BA in history from the University of Rochester, NY, her MA in Art History from Sussex University, UK, and her MFA from the California College of Arts, CA. Kremer has exhibited widely in the US and abroad. Her work is in many private and public collections, including the Whitney Museum of American Art, The Brooklyn Museum, The Berkeley Art Museum, The Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, and the US Embassy, Beijing, China.