In this exhibit, Gromyko Semper takes inspiration from Paul Klee’s painting “The Twittering Machine” which, like most of Klee’s works, melds the fields of biology and machinery together.

Semper channels the most recognizable iconography of Klee’s painting into this series, such as loosely sketched birds and hand-crank gadgetry, but injects his own idiosyncratic style to the mix, effectively bringing Klee’s 1922 work to the present. Semper’s typical proclivities are on full display here: his fondness for juxtaposing asynchronous color fields, ephemeral scribbles, scientific notations, and odd characters from different periods of history.

The works in this exhibit are characterized by a loose painterly approach, using old ephemera as a canvas for Semper’s superior academic drawing skills and contemporary painting technics, but also as instrument for experimentation.

Mechanics of A Twittering Machine, as a whole, reflects Semper’s wide-ranging influences, from the occult to science fiction and graphic novels. The series makes use of Semper’s outlandish visual style as a visual vocabulary to voice out the artist’s growing concerns about the role of technology on our humanity and its impending dystopic tendencies.