Mark Grotjahn

Shane Campbell Gallery, Chicago
Private Collection

Chicago, Shane Campbell Gallery, Mark Grotjahn, October - November 2013

This work is in excellent condition overall. There is a slight undulation to the sheet, which is inherent to the artist's working method. The sheet is hinged verso to the matte intermittently around the edges and framed under Plexiglas.
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“The butterfly has become to Mark Grotjahn what the target is to Kenneth Noland, the zip was to Barnett Newman, and the color 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

 

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 (Blush Pink and Kelly Green Butterfly 45.13) from 2013, Grotjahn creates a parallel pictorial universe in which geometric abstraction and traditional Western representational painting collide to masterful effect.

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 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 a while. 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. 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.