Mark Grotjahn - Contemporary Art Evening Sale London Friday, October 17, 2008 | Phillips

Create your first list.

Select an existing list or create a new list to share and manage lots you follow.

  • Provenance

    Anton Kern Gallery, New York; Zach Feuer Gallery (LFL), New York; Private Collection, USA

  • Catalogue Essay

    Drawing influence from both modernist abstraction and pop culture, Mark Grotjahn's paintings are intimate seductions, slipping between hard-edged design and emotive expression. Working from a centrally located vantage point, Grotjahn's butterfly paintings radiate with geometric bands of greenish hues, each creating a deception of space within the composition itself. Applied in thick impasto, the present lot's sleek forms dissolve into terrains of concentrated brushwork giving an effect of a painterly solidity that are built upon a series of opaque layers, the canvas texture and traces of under-painting create subtly shifting tones, flirting between the illusive and the concrete. 
     
    Mark Grotjahn's paintings reconstruct the architecture of abstraction on human scale. Set on narrow and elongated canvases, Grotjahn's Butterfly series renders the sublime through form and colour, creating a magnificent composition that plays upon the genre of minimalism, whilst adopting a slight playfulness.

321

Untitled (White Butterfly Fan)

2003
Oil on linen.
127 x 101.6 cm. (50 x 40 in).
Signed and dated 'M. Grotjahn 03' on the overlap.

Estimate
£300,000 - 400,000 

Sold for £337,250

Contemporary Art Evening Sale

18 Oct 2008, 7pm
London