Artists
Peter Gramberg is a photographer and visual artist born and raised in Amsterdam, The Netherlands.
In 1979 he started training as a fashion photographer but grew quickly bored with fashion and gravitated naturally towards musicians and artists he met on his travels.
He began to work for Music Magazine Vinyl (1981-1988) in the Netherlands portraying musicians, actors, designers and artists from all over the world but especially from England and the USA such as Mickey Rourke, Rammellzee, Ronnie Cutrone, Grandmaster Flash and Grandmaster Melle Mell, The Cure and many more.
This work and the encounters with these international artists, a meeting with Juliet Man Ray in Paris and an unforgettable visit with her to Man Ray’s old studio in Rue Ferou (still in the state as it was on the day he died in 1976) inspired him to start creating his own art in the middle of the 1980’s.
Especially significant was his first encounter with Rammellzee in 1984 which inspired him to work with Rammellzee again in 1987 resulting in a famous studio session in Amsterdam.
In the beginning of the 1990’s Peter moved to Cairo, Egypt for two years where he worked as a photographer for Pepsi Co and Johnson and Johnson and in his free time visited the Sinai Desert as often as he could to make the groundbreaking series Supermodels with a couple of young bedouin girls he encountered when traveling with the bedouin's as guides in the desert. He also took up painting with the help of the notorious Cairo billboard painters and portrait photography with the famous elder photographer Arto originally from Armenia who in the 1950's 60's and 70's took pictures of the Egyptian heads of state.
Back in Amsterdam in the middle of the 1990’s he quit photography and art altogether and began to pioneer in web and GUI design for big corporations and television shows since he found out his photographic background suited this kind of work very well and it was fun to do.
After years of inactivity because of the time it took to develop a digital business Peter briefly picked up his photography and started working again on his artworks when he was invited to show his series of still life’s based on 17th century paintings by famous dutch painter Adriaen Coorte for the Still Live Love exhibition in Amsterdam in 2005.
But his career really picked up steam again around 2018 when he got invited to contribute with the studio portraits he made with Rammellzee in 1987 for the comprehensive ‘Racing for Thunder Rammellzee retrospective’ at Red Bull Arts NY in Manhattan from May till August 2018. As a follow up on this exhibition he also got invited to contribute to the Writing the Future Basquiat and the Hip Hop Generation exhibition at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts in 2020. The success of the New York show finally inspired Peter to seriously start working on his art again, some of which was laying dormant since the 1990’s. At present Peter is finishing and completing these works comprising of paintings, sculptures, photographs, video clips and more.
Peter’s work is included in the collection of the Netherlands Museum of Photography in Rotterdam and in collections of private collectors and companies world wide.