BOBOK
by Orsten Groom
A corpse runs down a river in a wartime Europa. A vampire with a lost mouth that pulls a dead tongue and sows images as clues.
Some livings prowl around, patterns proliferate and beasts get involved.
Entirely handcrafted by Orsten Groom (camera, music, editing and lead actor), BOBOK dips between the macabre cartoon, the abstract thriller and the historical haunting.
Based on a true story.
"Wow , that wading cadaver with skewered fish and dangling tongue, all aflame, make for one of the most startling shots in all of film. Orsten Groom's ethos is incredible! Twisted, a little mean, often ugly, always gorgeous! "
Guy Maddin
Simon Leibovitz - Grzeszczak was born in 1982 in the Guyanese jungle from a Polish-Russian gang.
According to the legend, he fell into the underground sewers to be found there after three days,
perched naked on a promontory of excrement, guarded by a horde of bullfrog toads.
After this episode, he returned to Europe.
In 2002, he suffered a ruptured aneurysm at the Beaux-Arts de Paris, which he had just entered.
After emergency surgery after three days of cerebral haemorrhage, he miraculously emerged from the coma unharmed but amnesiac and epileptic.
Learning during his convalescence that he is at the Beaux-Arts as a painter, he goes back to the academy under his ancestors threat.
He then decided to sign henceforth his production as Orsten Groom, from painting to music,
sculpture, film and cubist poetry - which he refers to as Glues (stickier blues).
In 2011, he gives up painting and joins the Fresnoy (National Studio of Contemporary Arts) where he directs the movie BOBOK - a burlesque and macabre film about the adventures of a jawless vampire corpse with a turgescent tongue
in a river, in wartime Mittel Europa.
(Jury Prize award by André S. Labarthe at the Côté Court festival).
After that, he takes up brushes back again, keeps on making films and sets the band Dégueulasse
with Colombian artist Laura Huertas Millan.
He is noticed by Canadian filmmaker Guy Maddin, who hires him as a prop craftman & set-decorator for his project Séances at the Centre Pompidou , and his film The Forbidden Room.
Maddin writes about him:
"Wow, that wading cadaver with skewered fish and dangling tongue, all aflame, makes for one of the most startling shots in all of film!
Orsten Groom's ethos is incredible! Twisted, a little mean, often ugly, always gorgeous!"
He perseveres in painting and directing as well as the video cycle Les Ballets Russes with the author and Abel Gance specialist Elodie Tamayo.
Since 2013, he has been leading a Renaissance career centered on painting, as a complete self-reliant independent artist, and has signed several notable exhibitions between alternative and institutional realms.
In 2015, he is laureate of the Antoine Marin Painting Prize and in 2016, he is awarded by the Academy of Fine Arts on the recommendation of the Serbian painter Vladimir Velickovic.
In 2017, the critic and writer Paul Ardenne curates the Parisian exhibition ODRADEK.
He co-authored with the translator and poet André Markowicz the poem miscellany ORBE, for which he produced a cycle of five paintings, and ignited a gnostic Universal Encyclopedia project: The Physical and Natural Science.
In 2019 he creates the BUREAU ORSTEN GROOM, as an independent and self-management headquarter
for his various projects (exhibitions, editions, music, films).
The Marin paint brand creates and markets the Groom Pink Oil Tube.
In November 2019, the writer, curator and art critic Olivier Kaeppelin sides up with the Parisian exhibition
POMPEII MASTURBATOR - for which they receives a complaint from the city of Pompeii in person).
Groom’s first monograph is published (accompanied by texts by Olivier Kaeppelin, Paul Ardenne,
the writer Boris Wolowiec and the sculptor Elisabeth Schubert); he wins the Art est vivant - Endowment Fund award.
In 2020, the ACMCM Art Center (À Cent Mètres du Centre du Monde) offers him his first retrospective exhibition: EXOPULITAÏ.
The same year, he presents a wide ensemble of 35 large formats at the Urban Spree Gallery in Berlin, including the CHROME DINETTE series, dedicated to Freud and Moses.
In 2021, he sets up the JACQUELINE Glues band.
From April to July he sets up a clandestine private showroom during the Covid curfew with Olivier Kaeppelin:
the CHROME DINETTE Cabinet [appointments only]
The TEMPLON Gallery represents him from October on, starting with the solo exhibition SIEG MHUND KALUMNIATOR
An opera dedicated to the iconoclastic Byzantine emperor Constantine Copronymous is on its way, collaborating with the sulfurous underground writer-performer Jean-Louis Costes - as well as JACQUELINE first album.