Mark Grotjahn - The Collection of Halsey Minor New York Thursday, May 13, 2010 | Phillips

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  • Provenance


    Blum & Poe, Los Angeles; Private Collection

  • 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 overlap.

Estimate
$300,000 - 400,000 

Sold for $362,500

The Collection of Halsey Minor

13 May 2010
New York