Mark Grotjahn

Anton Kern Gallery, New York
Paul Kasmin Gallery, New York
Acquired by the present owner from the above

Los Angeles, The Hammer Museum, Mark Grotjahn: Drawings, January - April 2005

The work is in excellent condition overall. All four edges of the sheet are unevenly cut and there are puncture marks from staples along the top and bottom edges, which is presumably inherent to the artist’s working method. This work is hinged verso intermittently along the edges to the matte. Framed under Plexiglas.
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At the heart of Mark Grotjahn’s practice to date is an intense fascination with the interplay between illusionistic space and graphic representation. Since 1997, Grotjahn has employed the butterfly motif as a means to investigate Renaissance perspectival techniques with dual and multiple vanishing points. In his works on paper and paintings, the central vanishing point becomes the “body” of the butterfly out of which radiates the streaming colored starbursts or “wings.” While Grotjahn’s butterfly paintings are generally monochromatic and thickly layered, the drawings boast a brilliant spectrum of colors that alight from the page. In Untitled (Colored Butterfly White Background 6 Wings)from 2004, Grotjahn creates a parallel pictorial universe in which geometric abstraction and traditional Western representational painting collide to masterful effect.

In the present work, Grotjahn has adopted a rigorous system of production, drafting an infrastructure consisting of seven non-parallel lines that vertically traverse the paper. Grotjahn selects a group of colored pencils that hold together in both value and intensity, but then, choosing a color randomly, works methodically from left to right and top to bottom meticulously applying densely laid pencil marks to form solidly opaque planar segments. Grotjahn’s systematic ritual for laying down the butterfly form is in contrast to the arbitrary process by which the aberrant markings appear in the open expanse of his drawings; he works on smaller drawings placed on top of the paper, allowing his hand to stray off their edges. In this way, Grotjahn adds a diaristic layer of marks, many of which are completely obscured when the larger drawing is complete.  The surface of the present work is imbued with archaeological depth; at the core of Untitled (Colored Butterfly White Backround 6 Wings) is a five centuries old study of perspective that Grotjahn has layered with the haphazard markings of his own contemporary studio practice. 

Mark Grotjahn’s oeuvre grew out of conceptual sign making. Early in his career, he would painstakingly reproduce quirky graphics and phrases from local storefronts in his native Los Angeles. In turn, he would trade these handmade copies with the shop owners in exchange for the original signage, which Grotjahn then exhibited as his own. In 1998 Grotjahn displayed works from the Sign Replacement Project alongside a set of paintings stimulated by the perspectival inventions of the Renaissance. Grotjahn recalls: “I started to think about why I got into art in the first place. I was always interested in line and color. I wanted to find a motif that I could experiment with for awhile. I did a group of drawings over a period of six to twelve months. The drawing that I chose was one that resembled the three-tier perspective, and that is what I went with” (Arcy Douglass in conversation with Mark Grotjahn, 6 October 2010). Taking the initial concept one step further, Grotjahn tilted the axis ninety degrees, severing any ties to landscape painting that the horizontal orientation may have suggested. With the vertical body anchoring the center of the composition and the vectors radiating like starbursts, Grotjahn discovered a graphic framework that has become his most sustained visual investigation, generating endless permutations for the artist.

Although extremely focused and tightly nuanced in practice, Grotjahn’s butterflies engage with a broad swath of the history of non-objective art, from Constructivism and Futurism to Minimalism and Op-Art. Grotjahn’s handmade scaffolding supported by fractured geometries and lush vectors resonates in particular against the work of Julie Mehretu. However, while both artists create vibrating sensational pictorial planes built on line and color, Grotjahn’s concerns remain rooted in the conceptual underpinnings of picture making while Mehretu uses these formal tools to map political and social threads on a personal and global level. The way in which Grotjahn allows chance to define the precise arrangement of individual colors in his “wings,” refers to Gerhard Richter’s arbitrary selection of hues composing his Color Chart paintings in the late 1960s and early 1970s. As Robert Storr has aptly put it: "Grotjahn is not an artist obsessed with positing a wholly unprecedented 'concept' of art, but rather is concerned with teasing nuanced experience out of existing concepts or constructs according to the opportunities presented by a specific, well-calculated conceit. Nor is he really preoccupied with Ezra Pound's mandate to 'make it new;’ rather he wants to make it vivid, and applies all of his impressive skill to doing just that" (Robert Storr in Exh. Cat., New York, Gagosian Gallery,  "LA Push-Pull/Po-Mo-Stop-Go," Mark Grotjahn, New York, 2009, p. 6). Grotjahn’s Butterfly drawings are mesmerizing optical illusions; the delicately coalescing color fields that straddle each longitudinal band richly reference nature and movement, art history and contemporary practice.