Mark Grotjahn - Contemporary Art Evening Sale London Wednesday, February 11, 2009 | Phillips

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  • Provenance

    Goff + Rosenthal, New York

  • Catalogue Essay

    In his butterfly drawings, Mark Grotjahn transforms nature into conceptual abstraction. The drawings, labors of love covered with the artist's fingerprints, update natural-history painting for the twenty-first century. Made from gently curving parallel lines that start at the paper's edge and converge at the center, Grotjahn's drawings bring to mind Georgia O'Keeffe's close ups of flower stamens and pistils. Renaissance perspective merges nature and culture in Grotjahn's butterfly drawings, in which he anchors groupings of triangles to gently sloping vertical black lines, so that they look like abstract butterfly wings. If you stare at these quasi-Minimalist, Conceptual drawings for a while, the triangles start to flutter, like the wings of a butterfly floating on the breeze.
    (B. Goodbody, ‘Mark Grotjahn: Drawings at Hammer Projects,' U.C.L.A.'s Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, Art On Paper, May/June 2005, p. 78)

19

Untitled (Black and Cream Butterfly)

2006
Coloured pencil on paper laid down on board.
122 x 89 cm. (48 x 35 in).
 

Estimate
£40,000 - 60,000 ≠†

Sold for £51,650

Contemporary Art Evening Sale

12 Feb 2009, 7pm
London