Gromyko Semper - 'Woodcuts'

Gromyko Semper is an artist based in Cabantuan City, Philippines. Largely self taught, his work has been exhibited in Germany, the United States, Portugal and the United Kingdom., Semper’s drawings are executed to imitate woodcut prints, embody a personal, invented mythology after the fashion of William Blake in the early nineteenth century; the symbolists, surrealists and decadents; and up to and including British artist Patrick Woodroffe’s Mythopoeikon (1976) and The Pentateuch of the Cosmogony (1979) and the forerunner of Vienna School of Fantastic Realism, the influential visionary painter, Ernst Fuchs. Semper’s woodblock style has some affinities with Albretch Durer’s, but is quite unique, drawing heavily on both the Roman Catholic and supernatural folk traditions of the Philippines, quantum mechanics, alchemy, world mythology, classical art, occult, art nouveau, and the gamut of erotic drawing from Japanese Ukiyo-E to Aubrey Beardsley. Gromyko sees his artwork as a mystic revelation of a hitherto unknown mythos and pantheon, a synthesis of Jung, Kabala, Gnosticism, and various archetypes borrowed from the ancient civilisations of the Mediterranean, the Middle and Far East to encode a synthesis of his views.

(Gromyko Semper)