Renato Grome was born in Rome in 1954.
He lives in Sydney, Rome and Stockholm.
Renato Grome's work explores the many facets of his personal identity, often from the perspective of an outsider looking in. He uses the medium of photography to investigate multiple truths and multiple perceptions, blurring the lines along the way, stepping beyond barriers, searching for the universal languages that connect us all.
“I look at the world surrounding me with an out-of-body-vision, as though my eyes are outside their sockets, outside of my head, with a 360º vision.”
Grome is internationally known for his flower photographs produced through the technique of analogue reversal, creating images which are iconic, saturated and seductive, yet darkly disquieting.
Part of his quest is to develop new techniques to express each new series he produces. Some works are in analogue medium format, while at the opposite end of the spectrum, others are taken using a toy digital camera. Some of Grome's experimental photographs also involve the construction of custom-made rigs.
Renato Grome trained as a fine art restorer in Rome, working on masterpieces by Caravaggio and Raphael, as well as such 20th Century Italian artists as Corrado Cagli, Mario Schifano and Renato Guttuso. It was while working at Studio Donnini that Grome encountered the portrait of Saint Lucy which was seminal to his future work, and strongly influenced his visual language. His artistic passion began early. At the age of 11, he began experimenting with photography. He worked for many years based in Stockholm, shooting portraiture, travel, editorial and high-end advertising portfolios, collecting professional awards along the way, but always maintaining his obsession with fine art photography.
Grome is British, born in Rome, and raised in Italy and London amongst influential artists, writers, filmmakers and musicians. His father, John Grome, was a painter and Renato was named after his Sicilian godfather. the artist Renato Guttuso.
Renato Grome has exhibited in private galleries and public art institutions in Bologna, Boston, Melbourne, Paris, Rome, Stockholm, Sydney, Tokyo and Trieste.
In Renato Grome, born in Rome of British parents the day the Bikini explosion rocked the world, mingles the blood of artists and writers- his father, a painter descended from British aristocrats and the chaotic genius Sheridan, his midwife mother of British farmer roots.
He was named for his godfather, the Sicilian painter Renato Guttuso, reared among influential musicians and artists, he discovers the magic powers of photography early. Sent to school in cold grey England this rebellious boy, well whipped by his masters, escaped in his suit of crushed raspberry velvet to the sex and drugs and rock and roll mayhem of the ’60s London, and taken under the wing of the late Alexis Korner.
From there he was first apprenticed in Rome as a fine art restorer, scraping and cleaning Caravaggios and Raphaels, fascinated by the world of allegory and symbol revealed to him, thence to Paris in the grip of student revolution and on to Stockholm where free love and high-minded socialism reigned, he worked as a fashion model and furthered his understanding photography assisting François Gillet.
His career expanded and blossomed in a place where he felt at ease and where he fathered the lovely Melody, always the joy of his life. Sometimes a raver, always a rover, he based himself in Stockholm, setting up a studio there and working with camera and wayward searching eye in film and video, beaming his creativity on projects both commercial and purely aesthetic.
Perpetually searching new horizons, in the mid ‘90s he moves to Sydney, where stunning nature, sunshine and sea and new freedom from the shibboleths of old European culture, brought forth a fresh tide of new work and building on beginnings in Stockholm, he held several shows of work which imagination and technical understandings are fused with a wild and beautiful surrealism.
Renato has used a camera all his working life, knows well the rich diversity of its possibilities, and in his long dalliance with the mystery of light, spiller of the life force, creates images beyond the merely arresting, memorable, erotic and electric. He cultivates a garden where a new flora flourishes, familiar yet drenched in light and aflame with colour, metamorphosed. These are not pictures of flowers in the botanical sense. Enigmatic and surprising, playing with the ambiguity of the magic medium of ‘truth’, photography.
Christopher Gibbs, mentor to Renato Grome, is Trustee of The Edward James Foundation, prominent London antiquarian, writer and co-Art directed cult films Performance and Blow Up.
He lives in Sydney, Rome and Stockholm.
Renato Grome's work explores the many facets of his personal identity, often from the perspective of an outsider looking in. He uses the medium of photography to investigate multiple truths and multiple perceptions, blurring the lines along the way, stepping beyond barriers, searching for the universal languages that connect us all.
“I look at the world surrounding me with an out-of-body-vision, as though my eyes are outside their sockets, outside of my head, with a 360º vision.”
Grome is internationally known for his flower photographs produced through the technique of analogue reversal, creating images which are iconic, saturated and seductive, yet darkly disquieting.
Part of his quest is to develop new techniques to express each new series he produces. Some works are in analogue medium format, while at the opposite end of the spectrum, others are taken using a toy digital camera. Some of Grome's experimental photographs also involve the construction of custom-made rigs.
Renato Grome trained as a fine art restorer in Rome, working on masterpieces by Caravaggio and Raphael, as well as such 20th Century Italian artists as Corrado Cagli, Mario Schifano and Renato Guttuso. It was while working at Studio Donnini that Grome encountered the portrait of Saint Lucy which was seminal to his future work, and strongly influenced his visual language. His artistic passion began early. At the age of 11, he began experimenting with photography. He worked for many years based in Stockholm, shooting portraiture, travel, editorial and high-end advertising portfolios, collecting professional awards along the way, but always maintaining his obsession with fine art photography.
Grome is British, born in Rome, and raised in Italy and London amongst influential artists, writers, filmmakers and musicians. His father, John Grome, was a painter and Renato was named after his Sicilian godfather. the artist Renato Guttuso.
Renato Grome has exhibited in private galleries and public art institutions in Bologna, Boston, Melbourne, Paris, Rome, Stockholm, Sydney, Tokyo and Trieste.
In Renato Grome, born in Rome of British parents the day the Bikini explosion rocked the world, mingles the blood of artists and writers- his father, a painter descended from British aristocrats and the chaotic genius Sheridan, his midwife mother of British farmer roots.
He was named for his godfather, the Sicilian painter Renato Guttuso, reared among influential musicians and artists, he discovers the magic powers of photography early. Sent to school in cold grey England this rebellious boy, well whipped by his masters, escaped in his suit of crushed raspberry velvet to the sex and drugs and rock and roll mayhem of the ’60s London, and taken under the wing of the late Alexis Korner.
From there he was first apprenticed in Rome as a fine art restorer, scraping and cleaning Caravaggios and Raphaels, fascinated by the world of allegory and symbol revealed to him, thence to Paris in the grip of student revolution and on to Stockholm where free love and high-minded socialism reigned, he worked as a fashion model and furthered his understanding photography assisting François Gillet.
His career expanded and blossomed in a place where he felt at ease and where he fathered the lovely Melody, always the joy of his life. Sometimes a raver, always a rover, he based himself in Stockholm, setting up a studio there and working with camera and wayward searching eye in film and video, beaming his creativity on projects both commercial and purely aesthetic.
Perpetually searching new horizons, in the mid ‘90s he moves to Sydney, where stunning nature, sunshine and sea and new freedom from the shibboleths of old European culture, brought forth a fresh tide of new work and building on beginnings in Stockholm, he held several shows of work which imagination and technical understandings are fused with a wild and beautiful surrealism.
Renato has used a camera all his working life, knows well the rich diversity of its possibilities, and in his long dalliance with the mystery of light, spiller of the life force, creates images beyond the merely arresting, memorable, erotic and electric. He cultivates a garden where a new flora flourishes, familiar yet drenched in light and aflame with colour, metamorphosed. These are not pictures of flowers in the botanical sense. Enigmatic and surprising, playing with the ambiguity of the magic medium of ‘truth’, photography.
Christopher Gibbs, mentor to Renato Grome, is Trustee of The Edward James Foundation, prominent London antiquarian, writer and co-Art directed cult films Performance and Blow Up.