ORSTEN GROOM - SIEG MHUND KALUMNIATOR

“Man has the dangerous faculty of making others follow his example.” - Sigmund Freud

For the first time at Galerie Templon, young maverick painter Orsten Groom is presenting a series of canvases as spectacular as they are unclassifiable. The work offers a guttural, offbeat interpretation of history through the iconoclastic prism of images.

Untitled SIEG MHUND KALUMNIATOR, the exhibition features an evolving series of large-format canvases, like mural frescoes, centring on Freud and Moses, as well as an improbable canine pun. Describing his practice as "post-historical cave art", Orsten Groom proceeds by concatenating iconographic references, from Egyptian bas-reliefs to Andy Warhol. He interweaves his jubilant compositions with effects created by superimposition and perspective, revealing complex and unexpected connections on works to be enjoyed with 3D glasses.

Born in 1982 in Guyana, Simon Leibovitz - Grzeszczak is a multidisciplinary artist with Russo-Polish origins. At the age of 20, while studying at the Beaux-Arts in Paris, he suffered an aneurysm ruptured that left him amnesic and epileptic. Learning he was a painter during his convalescence, he returned to school in the studios of François Boisrond and Jean-Michel Alberola. From then on, he turned into Orsten Groom and positioned himself as a fierce independent artist and developed a protean body of work that extended from painting to film and music. He has collaborated with the curators Paul Ardenne and Olivier Kaeppelin, the filmmaker Guy Maddin and the poet and translator André Markowicz, and has produced a number of exhibitions that have attracted attention in France and abroad. In 2020, the Perpignan ACMCM Art Center (A Cent Mètres du Centre du Monde), devoted his first retrospective exhibition. In 2021, he takes advantage of the Covid siege to open with Olivier Kaeppelin the CHROME DINETTE Cabinet, a private clandestine showroom with a secret Parisian address. SIEG MHUND KALUMNIATOR is his first exhibition at the Templon Gallery.

Photo credit: URIGSZENE, [CHROME DINETTE series], 160 x 215cm, 2021