There is a fierce velocity to the thickly impastoed lines of Untitled (Standard Lotus XVI Face 44.15), 2013, which fly from the edges of the work towards a vertical, feathered black stripe down the center of the composition. Mark Grotjahn’s strips of paint are shapeshifters; they blossom into the shape of a red lotus at the top of the canvas, reminiscent of the series’ titular flower. Another line of red curls into a smile across the lower center, and a blue teardrop shape suggests a dark eye with a red pupil. These vibrant stripes exemplify the visual language of the artist’s 2010s practice, as he deftly combines generations of artistic innovations into his own signature style.

“[Grotjahn] possesses the ‘historical sense,’ which [Modernist writer T.S.] Eliot considered indispensable to an artist in his maturity: a consciousness of the past’s multiplicity, of the spectrum of historical voices that speak through any contemporary voice.”
—Mark Prince

Untitled (Standard Lotus XVI Face 44.15) embodies the signature art-historical inspirations of Grotjahn’s oeuvre. There’s a visual similarity between Grotjahn’s expressive brushstrokes and the practices of Abstract Expressionists such as Willem de Kooning, and a textural parallel to Pierre Soulages’ richly impastoed black paintings in Grotjahn’s thick, overlapping lines. Grotjahn calls on the practices of these artists’ Modernist ancestors, as well, by taking the human form as the starting point for his abstract practice. In particular, Cubism and German Expressionism are key Modernist referents for Untitled (Standard Lotus XVI Face 44.15). The Cubist sense of fragmentation, and the German Expressionists’ rich, yet dark, color combinations come together in Untitled (Standard Lotus XVI Face 44.15)’s partial face, and the jarring combination of a blue eye and red pupil in the darkness.

 

When speaking about his Face series, Grotjahn shares, “I like the description of the eyes coming out of the jungle…I sometimes pretend the faces are baboons or monkeys.” However, he is quick to clarify: “I can’t say I’ve been influenced by African art particularly or consciously except that I’ve been influenced by artists who have been influenced. Picasso being the most obvious,” with links to German Expressionists such as Paul Klee and Emil Nolde also present.ⁱ

 

The lozenge shape of the blue eye in Untitled (Standard Lotus XVI Face 44.15) is perhaps the “most obvious” reference to Picasso in the present work, to quote the artist directly. Picasso’s signature eye shape, in turn, was likely inspired by the ovoid eyes of a Congolese Vili figure owned by Henrí Matisse, which Picasso saw in 1906, one year before he completed his seminal painting, Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, Museum of Modern Art, New York.ⁱⁱ Unlike his Modernist forebears, however, Grotjahn deftly eludes the racist traps of the Primitivism that often accompanied Modernist appropriations of African aesthetics (which include masklike visages, geometric patterns, and bright color combinations), by fully immersing himself in the abstraction of his work.ⁱⁱⁱ

 

The abstraction of Grotjahn’s faces increases with time, a trend visible in Untitled (Standard Lotus XVI Face 44.15)—which, dated 2013, comes roughly two-thirds through its respective subseries of Face paintings—in the partial representation of mouth and eye. The artist creates within an early Modernist paradigm in which abstraction and figuration are not mutually exclusive, and this tension serves as the inspiration for his work.^iv As Mark Prince writes, “For Grotjahn, the vanishing point had become the vanishing self.”^v  Grotjahn himself reflects on this, with an artist’s statement from 2010, in which he notices the cyclicality of abstraction across his series, from his early Butterflies to the Face series: “my practice is just coming full circle,” he says, “the snake continues to eat its tail.”^vi

 

 

ⁱ Mark Grotjahn, quoted in “Interview with Mark Grotjahn,” Oct. 10, 2010, PortlandArt, online.

ⁱⁱDenise Murrell, “African Influences in Modern Art,” The Met: Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History, 2008, online.

ⁱⁱⁱ Ibid.; Christopher Knight, “Art review: Mark Grotjahn at Blum & Poe,” The Los Angeles Times, Mar. 12, 2010, online.

^iv Roberta Smith, “Mark Grotjahn: ‘Nine Faces,’” The New York Times, May 12, 2011, online.

^v Mark Prince, “The Divided Self: Mark Grotjahn’s ‘Circus’ series/Das geteilte Selbst: Mark Grotjahns ‘Circus’-Serie,” in Mark Grotjahn: Circus Circus, exh. cat., Kunstverein Freiburg, Freiburg im Breisgau, 2014, p. 24.

^vi Grotjahn, quoted in Mark Grotjahn: Seven Faces, exh. cat., Blum & Poe, Los Angeles, 2010, n.p.