Mark Grotjahn - Contemporary Art Part I New York Thursday, May 15, 2008 | Phillips

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  • Provenance


    Anton Kern Gallery, New York

  • Exhibited


    New York, Anton Kern Gallery, Mark Grotjahn, October 9 - November 15, 2003

  • Literature


    J. Saltz, “The Parallax View,” Artnet Magazine, October 24, 2006 (illustrated)

  • Catalogue Essay


    Mark Grotjahn’s latest works – a series of variously sized jewel-like monochrome canvases that toy with one-point perspective – are flat out gorgeous. This should be said right off, since discussions of Grotjahn’s work tend to leap quickly into speculation of what lurks (literally and figuratively) behind their surfaces. If there’s a plumb line running through this young artist’s oeuvre, it’s a love for and deft utilization for the opaque. But Grotjahn’s taste for the impermeable is hardly delivered straight from the shoulder; a perverse formalism is his delicious decoy, both an homage to and usurpation of (by now amply deconstructed) modernist tactics. Grotjahn’s works are designed to flirt with the eye and plant ideas in the head. The paint – effusive orange, green, cream, black or gray – is dense, sculpted by a brush that has left intentional evidence of its traces. Yet peeking out from beneath the thick facet of pigment is, in every instance, a second color; on the edges, between strokes, but, most important, shaping the hollowed contours of the artist’s initials. Where so much classical painting opts to depict the pregnant moment just before the narrative climax, in Grotjahn’s hands the canvas itself becomes gravid. These hints of yellow beneath green or pink beneath black offered the possibility (though by no means the only one) that id-driven expressionist strokes hovered just below the mathematically precise, if intentionally skewed, composition.
    J. Burton, “Mark Grotjahn, Anton Kern,” Art Forum, December 2003, pp. 146-147

105

Untitled (Pink Butterfly Green MG03)

2003

Oil on linen.

36 x 28 in. (91.4 x 71.1 cm).

Initialed and dated “MG 03” lower right.

Estimate
$400,000 - 600,000 

Sold for $757,800

Contemporary Art Part I

15 May 2008, 7pm
New York