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

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  • Provenance

    Blum & Poe, Los Angeles; Private collection, Los Angeles

  • Catalogue Essay

    Mark Grotjahn's latest works – a series of variously sized jewel-like monochrome canvases that toy with one-point perspective – are flat out gorgeous. This should be said right off, since discussions of Grotjahn's work tend to leap quickly into speculation of what lurks (literally and figuratively) behind their surfaces. If there's a plumb line running through this young artist's oeuvre, it's a love for and deft utilization for the opaque. But Grotjahn's taste for the impermeable is hardly delivered straight from the shoulder; a perverse formalism is his delicious decoy, both a homage to and usurpation of (by now amply deconstructed) modernist tactics. Grotjahn's works are designed to flirt with the eye and plant ideas in the head. The paint – effusive orange, green, cream, black or gray – is dense, sculpted by a brush that has left intentional evidence of its traces. Yet peeking out from beneath the thick facet of pigment is, in every instance, a second color; on the edges, between strokes, but, most important, shaping the hollowed contours of the artist's initials. Where so much classical painting opts to depict the pregnant moment just before the narrative climax, in Grotjahn's hands the canvas itself becomes gravid. These hints of yellow beneath green or pink beneath black offered the possibility (though by no means the only one) that id-driven expressionist strokes hovered just below the mathematically precise, if intentionally skewed, composition.
    (J. Burton, ‘Mark Grotjahn, Anton Kern', Art Forum, December 2003,pp. 146-147)

7

Untitled (Pink Butterfly M02G)

2002
Oil on linen.
121.9 x 86.4 cm. (48 x 34 in).
Signed, titled and dated ‘M. GROTJAHN02 Pink Butterfly M02G' on the overlap.

Estimate
£200,000 - 300,000 ≠†

Sold for £181,250

Contemporary Art Evening Sale

12 Feb 2009, 7pm
London