Creased steel gilded with fine 24-karat gold.

Size 94 x 77 x 5.5 cm (framed)
Approximate size 53 x 46 x 2 cm (unframed)

Each piece is unique.

Created especially for ArtGenève 2020 by Swiss artist and designer Philippe Cramer, the Apotropaic amulets are an extension of his creative practice.
Philippe Cramer regularly refers to artistic expressions and artifacts from ancestral societies, which today can often be found in museum display cases.
Partly from the Captromancie series, the works presented here are made of crumpled steel and gilded with fine gold. They take on anthropomorphic appearances, evoking masks of rituals from past civilizations, hammered from flat sheets of gold.

To the artist, they are objects of transmission, recalling our past and acting like a talisman to facilitate our entry into the contemporary, dematerialized world. He therefore invites the viewer to reintegrate the founding elements that built our civilization to help shape its future.

Philippe Cramer began his artistic career with the medium of design, focusing on furniture and home accessories in particular. His attachment to the material as well as to the techniques of both industrial manufacturing and craftsmanship can be traced to his first professional experience. Yet a spirit of dissolving the boundaries between creative genres forms an integral part of his artistic development and firmly places him in a new generation that seeks to erase the lines between categories; like the profound changes that are currently taking place among the types of identity, race, and sexuality.

Philippe Cramer does not hesitate to experiment with different techniques and styles of visual expression while combining certain motifs and recurrent themes in his creativity. One might even suggest that, like a composer, he is creating Variations on a Theme.
Evoking the transformation of his creative world, Philippe recently professed in an interview : “My consciousness is in perpetual evolution.” It’s easy to make the analogy : in the study of his new work, the recipient of his artistic message is invited to absorb this metamorphosis and to perceive new possibilities as much of artistic expression as of a way of life.
By creating works halfway between the painting, the sculpture, the piece of furniture, and the object of applied art, he positions himself at the crossroads of a postmodern challenge of the disciplines.
Philippe Cramer has thus developed a singular practice that spans artistic ranges : from tapestry to jewelry, through ceramics and paintings, he multiplies the referents and sets a precedent for future generations.