London, Stephen Friedman Gallery, Mark Grotjahn, 7 June – 16 July 2005; USA Today: London, Royal Academy of Arts, 6 October – 4 November 2006; St. Petersburg, The State Hermitage Museum, 24 October 2007 – 13 January 2008; London, Saatchi Gallery, Abstract America: New Painting & Sculpture, 29 May 2009 –17 January 2010
Literature
USA Today, exh. cat., Royal Academy of Arts, London, 2006, p. 161 (illustrated); Abstract America: New Painting & Sculpture, exh. cat., Saatchi Gallery, 2008, p. 62 (illustrated)
Catalogue Essay
"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 ... After all, Winters, Marden, and many of the artists with whom Grotjahn may be favourably compared are contemporary Mannerists – that is, painters who have elaborated on tropes and formats previously found in painting and developed distinctive ways of working that mine the unexploited potential of the modernist mother lode." (Robert Storr, ‘LA Push-Pull/Po-Mo-Stop-Go', in Mark Grotjahn, exh. cat., Gagosian Gallery, London, 2009, p. 6)