Los Angeles, Richard Telles Fine Art, Plip, Plip, Plippity, September 10 - October 8, 2005
Catalogue Essay
Discussions of Grotjahn's work tend to leap quickly into speculation on what lurks (literally and figuratively) behind their surfaces. If there's a plumb line harming through this young artist's oeuvre, it's a love for and deft utilization of 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. No surprise, then, that Grotjahn has been discussed in terms of a handful of otherwise incommensurable artists (Andy Warhol, Alfred Jensen) and styles (Cubist, Color Field). J. Burton, “Mark Grotjahn: Anton Kern,” Art Forum, December 2003