Michael Gromm’s paintings speak of an open, two-way process of making, of the physical actions of painting and the emotional impacts of looking. Gromm’s large fluid paintings seek to suspend the viewer in a state of preternatural ‘nowness’ creating moments of visual and mental spaciousness, capable of encouraging creativity, reflection and calm within an increasingly complex and rapidly changing world. This will be Michael's sixth solo exhibition with the gallery.
Artist StatementSaying something and nothing at the same time. Everything hurts and nothing matters. I’m cooler than you but you don’t care. I can have anything I want but I don’t want it. Anything, all of the time. Friends are for losers. The fact that I am dying makes you feel alive. You chat to anyone but have nothing to say. You should love yourself today but probably won’t. Just try and get lost. Painting is a form of reverse archeology. You poke away at the surface, applying layer upon layer, building into time. Much like archaeology my work is process driven, combining multiple techniques and visual ideals, Sometimes working backward as well as forwards, hiding truths and revealing lies. They are relics from my interaction with time and matter, created in the slither of space that is the ‘now’.
Catalogue essay by Phe Luxford 2023 While many artists set out to articulate a predetermined vision through their practice, Melbourne artist Michael Gromm uses the act of painting to navigate an open-ended journey of discovery. For him the question is not what to paint, but rather how to harness the unexpected, how to allow his practice the freedom to respond to what has gone before. Housed within the fluid layers of his paintings, his works inhabit a space of fluxing consequence, endlessly oscillating between the before and after, between states of excision and emergence.
Charged with dynamic action, the paintings in his latest exhibition Doom ‘n’ Bloom demand to be watched rather than passively looked at. They are alive and full of surprises, their lines and gestures, rich colours and contrasting textures piling up across the picture plane, creating vast internal spaces that seem to move beyond the two dimensional. Gromm speaks of his practice as a kind of ‘reverse archaeology’, mining the surface of his canvases to find hidden relics or unexpected gems within. He recently spent time at the Australian Museum in Sydney, intending to investigate their collection of dinosaur bones. Instead he found himself gravitating towards the museum’s vast gemstone collection, the variety of colours and textures, as well as the aeons of time compacted into their formation, resonating with his practice. In his studio the act of painting is physical, spontaneous and almost performative. The controlled destruction or alteration of each paint gesture as it nudges into some earlier iteration becomes a kind of transformative proliferation. Marks are blotted out or built up, colours mixed and muddied. Small glistening details are inserted into swathes of rippling under-paint. Each layer becomes a testament to the artist’s time, each mark an articulation of a state of “nowness”. Tumbling over one another, pushing in divergent directions, active all at once, reading the whole becomes a baffling business.
Inspired by the concept of geological time, Gromm plays with the double-edged truth of existence; of the somewhat nihilistic view that all things eventually turn to dust, that civilisations fall, and that species, like the dinosaur, go extinct. But alongside the inevitable change and decline comes opportunities for renewal and new depths of awareness. Motivated by this state of existential uncertainty, his abstractions operate within the laws of chaos; acknowledging that every choice has a consequence, that every action informs the next, and that there are no neat endings. The ceaseless flow of time and the latent “now” are the only certainties in life.
Gromm’s work embraces this unknown with a robust sense of critical optimism, toying with expectations and assumptions about how paintings are made. What appears buried may in fact be sitting on the surface, what looks spontaneous could well have been laboured over. Through their complexity they invite us to examine their sense of time and to become entangled in their disorientating visual clamour. Like a cosmic big bang each painting feels endless, capable of sustaining an ongoing state of emergence.
The works have been taken out of the studio now, thrust into the present moment, sitting in a gallery, still and sated. Each has been assigned a unique name, a set of words or a phrase that tethers them back to some past moment in the artist’s life, to the relentless chatter of consciousness, the sometimes flawed, sometimes laughable path of this mortal coil. After the paint has dried and the artist’s energy has been spent, all that’s left to do is allow the paintings to reveal our true place within the infinite. After all, we might well be the next dinosaurs.
Timelapse in the studio
ARTIST BIO:Michael Gromm holds a Bachelor of Fine Art degree from the University of Ballarat. He has been a finalist in the Geelong Contemporary Art Prize (2016), the Scope Galleries Art Prize (2012), the Metro Gallery Art Prize (2010), the Fletcher Jones Contemporary Art Prize (2008) and was announced the winner of the David Pratt Drawing Award (2001). Gromm was selected to exhibit in FLG’s Exploration exhibition in 2015 and was subsequently awarded the FLG Emerging Artist Award. His works are held in collections in Singapore, USA and across Australia. He has been exhibiting with FLG since 2016.
