Mark Grotjahn - Contemporary Art Part I New York Thursday, May 17, 2007 | Phillips

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  • Provenance

    Blum & Poe, Los Angeles

  • Catalogue Essay

    “It’s something of a cliché to say that paintings conceal as much as they reveal but so much in Grotjahn’s work seems buried under the skin, and so little is ever really given away, that one bestows unusual significance upon the painterly glitches and hiccups that occur. Apparently evidencing trial and error, the smears of ink and pencil that litter the surfaces of his drawings lend them a work-a-day honesty that, ironically, seems quite underhand – as if the artist was calling our bluff. Revealed beneath the thick surfaces of his paintings are flashes of other colours and traces of earlier activity in stark contrast to the chromatic sobriety and measured pace of the ‘finished’ article – loosely applied acid yellow beneath green, purple beneath black, for example. Where a second colour peeks through at a vanishing point, celestial connotations are brought to the fore.”
    (M.Coomer, “The Butterfly Effect”, ArtReview, Issue 03, September, 2006, p.76).

2

Untitled (Black Butterfly over Lime)

2004
Oil on linen.
36 x 29 in. (91.4 x 73.7 cm).
Signed and dated “M. Grotjahn 04” twice on the reverse.

Estimate
$40,000 - 60,000 

Sold for $360,000

Contemporary Art Part I

17 May 2007
7pm New York