Enk DE KRAMER

1946 – 2024

 

Enk De Kramer (°1946) studied at the Sint-Lucas Hogeschool in Ghent and perfected his craft in Belgrade (Ex-Yugoslavia). Until 2001 he taught graphics at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts of the Hogeschool Gent. He exhibited in the Netherlands, Austria, Germany, France, Italy and Japan.

He shows himself to be a master of contemporary abstract lyricism through intaglio techniques including carburendum applications, dry needle and very personal subject matter. He strives for coloristic richness through various intermediate and overprints. As a graphic artist, he prefers a very limited edition which gives his work a unique character. The very system of graphics is questioned and answered by Enk De Kramer. He does not make series of the same, but rather a series of the differences, of the variations on a theme. Each unique print is part of a plastic thought process around a motif. Only when all possibilities have been exhausted is another motif tapped into. The whole of such an experiment forms a series, variations on a form theme. Here the art of etching offers a pictorial possibility like no other, because the repeatability is contained in the etching plate and because highly contained variations, the so-called different states, are possible. Enk De Kramer has replaced the “reproducibility” of the graphic with “repeatability.” In this way, he breaks with the basic functional principle of the graph, namely that it would be a method of production by which the result becomes a print, by definition stripped of the aura associated with the uniqueness of a coastal work.