Dating back to the one-point perspective paintings of the 1500’s, Grotjahn takes this development in art from the Renaissance steps further into the Now. In the present lot, Grotjahn fosters a minimalist style. Like the work of Agnes Martin, this particular painting shows extreme peaceful, subtle colors in a geometric composition of lines and grids which allows for an automatic connection to the natural world. The present lot evokes rays of white light and the title alone alludes wings of a butterfly which according to the chaotic theory of the Butterfly Effect, the idea that a butterfly flapping its wings in one part of the world may cause a hurricane or a tornado in another part of the world.
In a palette of creams and whites Grotjahn paints purity in a complex, monochrome layered form in what appears to be quick luminous “zip” strokes. Through what seems to be seamless, easily facilitated brushstrokes, the artist simultaneously merges with the same ease geometric abstraction to conceptualism. Similar to a beautifully composed Sol LeWitt wall drawing, Grotjahn’s paintings follow a rhythm which is constant, linear and traditional. His perspective paintings create illusions of depth by including multiple vanishing points and adding building blocks of abstraction through the choice of a monotone palette. Grotjahn purposely engraves his initials into the diptych playfully adding to the simple, yet complex, layers of paint to give the illusion of what appears to be a two- dimensional perspective plane is in fact three-dimensional.
Through the reference of nature as seen in White Butterfly the artist connects to abstraction with echoes of the simplicity of an Agnes Martin and the precision of a Sol LeWitt Wall Drawing. Grotjahn questions the nature of art through his paintings and drawings. Grotjahn illustrates a metamorphosis in his ongoing series of butterfly paintings by bridging origins of Renaissance Art through specific movements in art history such as Russian Constructivism to Minimalism to Abstraction to Conceptualism, and alas the present moment. As the term “butterfly” used in ancient Greece meaning soul or mind, Grotjahn digs into both in White Butterfly by revealing an intimate yet nostalgic, classic example of his oeuvre of work.
These paintings are elegant, sumptuous and glamorous; they hold the wall boldly with assuredness…. Voluptuous, but at ease, each painting did not relinquish its overall sense of being a seamless whole, a thing, in other words, greater than the sum of its parts, even as careful inspection began to parse each painting’s complex structure and reveal smaller nuances and details. These works awaken an awareness of the obdurate, incommensurate, and, finally, inexplicable experience of abstract painting, a form forged a hundred years ago, which, while given up for dead at many points along the way has remained. Yet, as Robert Ryman once remarked in a talk at the Danheiser Foundation in downtown Manhattan in the late 1980s: abstract painting is still a young form, which is only beginning to be discovered and developed.
G. Garrels, “Within Blue,” Parkett 80, 2007, p. 127