Mark Grotjahn

Jack Tilton Gallery, New York

London, Royal Academy of Arts; St Petersburg, The State Hermitage Museum, USA TODAY: New American Art from The Saatchi Gallery, 2006-08, p. 158 (London) and p. 54 (St Petersburg), illustrated in colour
London, The Saatchi Gallery, Abstract America: New Paintings & Sculpture at The Saatchi Gallery, 2009-10, p. 55, illustrated in colour

The colours in the catalogue illustration are fairly accurate, although the overall tonality is brighter and more vibrant with the red hues tending more towards brilliant red-orange and the green more towards brilliant lime green in the original. This work is in very good condition. No restoration is apparent under ultraviolet light.
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"A butterfly in space excites my imagination. Freed from rhetoric I lose myself in time"

Lucio Fontana cited in: Renato Miracco, Lucio Fontana at the Roots of Spatialism, Milan 2006, p. 49

"The butterfly has become to Mark Grotjahn what the target is to Kenneth Noland, the zip was to Barnett Newman, and the colour white is to Robert Ryman, Grotjahn's abstracted geometric figure is suitably elusive. In fact, the more familiar it becomes, the more he refines its ability to surprise and, perhaps paradoxically, takes it further away from actual butterflyness."

Michael Ned Holte, 'Mark Grotjahn' in: Artforum, November 2005, p. 259

Mark Grotjahn's stunning work Untitled (Orange Butterfly Green MG 03) of 2003 is a captivating display of the perspectival reorientation and sumptuous colour immersion that has made this artist one of the most exciting painters working in America today. Unfailingly descriptive with its precisely accurate title, the soubriquet of Butterfly has come to stand for a variety of abstract concepts in Grotjahn's work, ranging from an Op like formal linearity to the expansion and retraction of space itself, while also of course evoking the beautiful symmetry and display of the actual wings of a butterfly.

While the formative paintings of his early career were heavily dependent on text and derived much of their conceptual weight from home-made signs of the sort found in shop windows and consisting of different graphics or varying point size and font type, in the late 1990s he developed geometric paintings with multiple and independent vanishing points usually with three horizon lines in a single canvas. Shortly after the turn of the millennium he developed his aesthetic dialect further with compositions constrained by narrower, vertical format canvases, filled to bursting with the radiating orthogonals of so-called "butterfly" wings. The present work is an early and outstanding paragon of this body of works, and typifies the salient themes of method and concept of his best work. Furthermore, the prominent signature with the artist's initials MG and the date 03 in the lower right corner of the canvas precisely renders the importance of text in his work, as discussed by Johanna Burton: "Language plays a significant role on and off the artist's canvases, particularly in his use of ambiguity (saying "butterfly" and meaning "abstraction...). Like Ryman, Grotjahn uses his signature as verbal signifier and as formal device, leaving us to determine where one ends and the other begins" (Johanna Burton, "Mark Grotjahn: Anton Kern", ArtForum, December 2003).

That these signifiers of the artist's presence are scribed in brilliant emerald green, the exact complimentary to the pillar-box red that dominates most of the canvas, further elucidates the central role of colour relationships in his work, and his indebtedness to the colour-field painters that came before him. Indeed, as Max Henry has pointed out, Grotjahn's paintings, as crystallised in the present work, draw on a rich seam of art historical precedent: "The paintings themselves are hard-edged spatial illusions in rich gradations of colour that appear to expand and contract...Grotjahn actually riffs from the whole range of abstraction: Malevich, Mark Rothko, Ad Reinhardt, Frank Stella, Brice Marden et al. Unlike the constructivists who rejected decorative reference or 'subjectivity', Grotjahn is actively encoding references including pop psychedelic associations" (Max Henry in: Exhibition Catalogue, London, The Saatchi Gallery, Abstract America: New Paintings & Sculpture at The Saatchi Gallery, 2009-10, p. 7)