Ethan Kramer
Second Thought Best Thought

October 15 – November 8, 2025
48 Ludlow Street, NYC

Entrance announces the debut solo exhibition of Ethan Kramer. Second Thought Best Thought is on view from October 15 until November 8 at 48 Ludlow Street. Kramer is a recent graduate from Cooper Union where Amy Sillman was his mentor and professor.

The Scrap Heap by Amy Sillman, October 2025 

Ethan Kramer came from out of LA and then Chicago and then came to New York City, and he fell in love with painting-- real painting, serious painting, all of it. When I first met him, he was a student at Cooper and he told me rather proudly and also with comical delivery that no one liked his paintings, that they weren't in style, and that he works like a person who is stranded on a desert island-- by which he meant to explain his ridiculously offhand, almost impoverished studio practice, with paint palettes made of whatever is at hand, paper cups or pizza boxes, or whatever, and balanced on top of various off-kilter furniture in his studio. In fact of course it wasn't true that no one liked his paintings, but such is Ethan's self-deprecating comedy, a characteristic that is also in his work, though he is in fact in a serious love relationship with painting, which is exactly what painting wants. He has chosen one of the most difficult partners you can hook up with-- painting has a mean streak: it can be cruel. 

By now Ethan knows that it can make you feel really bad. Painting can be narrow, difficult, and touchy, and painting loves it when you know all about it, when you look at ALL the paintings,  but painting doesn't want you to make a painting that looks like you're too knowing. But then god forbid if you don't know enough to hang around with it. Painting will have none of that. So by now Ethan knows the complicated dance that painting wants you to be in with it. And he still loves it, even though painting can be a real pain in the ass.  But he is all in. He absorbs painting like a thirsty camel, and stores everything he learns about it in his hump, and then shambles off to his studio with this knowledge inside him,  about a funny, oblique, humble looking, referential but inventive kind of painting, a nomadic spirit in painting that is salvaged from everywhere,  and yet that must ring true as totally one's own, a recipe from scratch, and from one's own sense of touch, that must be both in good taste and yet fresh. 

His kind of painting is tactile but physical; intelligent but impulsive;  linguistic but absurd.  This kind of attitude in painting, amiable but defiant, ugly but tender, has a long history that includes many protagonists, like Forrest Bess and Martha Diamond and Bulgarian cave painters from the year zero and Fontana's ceramics and Alice Mackler, etc etc etc. It's a painting about the comedy that is the body, and the poignant area of the personal, of human error, of the modestly handmade. 

Ethan's been developing his version of this, an intimate and yet robust language of dots, glyphs, blobs, wonky geometries, off colors, and an aleatory kind of calligraphy.  To all of this, he's always added moves poached from painting's scrap heaps, as well as from the actual garbage can in his studio hallway, a rich source of art supplies and ideas for him, as he tries out feelings and forms and their redactions, second thoughts, overlays,  a syntax of elements drawn from everywhere, from refuse to masterpieces, and from his own life, from his life's own ludic moments, disclosures, small acts, throwaways, all of which populate his work. When he lays all of this out into a syntax in a gallery it should remind us that we are human, in touch, able to take hold of the scrappy moments of our lives, and make a language out of it, and thereby to recycle time, too, as something wonderful. 

Ethan Kramer (b. 2001, Los Angeles, CA) lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. A graduate of The Cooper Union, Kramer works primarily in painting and mixed media, utilizing salvaged industrial materials as tools for his work. Drawn to dumpster found off-cuts from commercial projects, he recognizes historical abstract forms and how they migrated into everyday use. These discarded shapes carry traces of their origins in abstraction, filtered through the media landscape before being cast off as waste. Kramer's practice is an exercise in knowing what to look for in unpredictable places. He brings leftover forms back to painting for reconsideration, working with abstraction held loosely in the periphery rather than a fixed reference point.

Recent exhibitions and projects include DUFTPYRAMIDE XXS at Parfümerie, Frankfurt am Main organized by Elisaveta Braslavskaia (2025); The White Columns Benefit Auction (2025), Felix Art Fair (2025); Open in Safari, a two-person show with Rosabel Ferber at Ladybug Gallery, Providence, RI (2024); and his thesis exhibition Waiting for a Flavor at The Cooper Union (2024). His work was also featured in Yes Way, alongside Ethan Means curated by Nathan Feniak at Entrance (2023).

For inquiries, email info@entrance.nyc