Provenance
Acquired directly from the artist
Phillips de Pury & Company, New York,Under the Influence, 21 March 2008, Lot 17
Acquired from the above sale by the present owner
Exhibited
New York, The Drawing Center, Selections Winter 1998. Ingrid Calame, Miriam Dym, Mark Grotjahn, Gerhard Mayer, and Stephanie Syjuco, 9 January - 14 February 1998
Literature
M. Grotjahn, Mark Grotjahn: Drawings, Ostfildern, 2006 p. 60 (illustrated)
Catalogue Essay
'I was always interested in line and color. I wanted to find a motif that I could experiment with for a while. I did a group of drawings over a period of six to twelve months. The drawing that I chose was one that resembled the three tier perspective, and that is what I went with.' (Mark Grotjahn as quoted in A. Douglass, 'Interview with Mark
Grotjahn,'Portland Art, 6 October 2010, Online.)

Driven from both modernist abstraction and pop culture, Mark Grotjahn’s works are personal allurements, between the naturally hard-edged representation of geometric abstraction and emotive communication. In his Three-Tiered Perspective series, Grotjahn uses various vanishing points to create an optical effect, portraying a three-dimensional space on a two-dimensional surface. As a forerunner to his renowned Butterfly paintings, this series is a vibrant exploration of multiple perspectives and a creation of deep space and movement. Having begun working with coloured pencils to develop perspective drawings, he soon established a distinction in his field of work; an intense exploration of a more conventional drawing being the collusion of abstract criteria and random collection, characteristic of the oeuvre Untitled (Three-Tiered Perspective), 1997.

Creating such compositions of three different horizontal landscapes, Mark Grotjahn focuses on the eye as an instrument, ‘the eye is always searching for an implicit point of stability that cannot be found’ (Aspen Art Museum, Mark Grotjahn, Aspen Art Press, 2012, p.62). Whilst his Butterfly series focuses the eye on a single view point, the use of various vanishing points on one single work draw the viewer inward creating an illusion of deep space and motion on a flat surface. Playing with the rigors of perception, he is in effect producing a hallucinatory vision. With the inspiration of a more traditional technique from the Renaissance era but with modern day creativity, Grotjahn manipulates the use of linear perspective with bold tonal modulations of colour to create a vibrant sense of depth, giving existence to both form and colour and allowing them to exist individually. This technique, for Grotjahn, creates the structure of the work and essentially becomes the principal of the subject. The shifted placements of the points break the compositional balance. The final product is a simple arrangement of coloured forms which results in a composition of movement, proportion, colour and focus.

While there is an almost classical lucidity to Grotjahn's established organization of dividing the composition into three separate rectangular rows of converging polychromatic stripes all of which are separated by horizontal bands, his use of colour is to a certain extent completely random. The random arrangement of the colours comes from the result of him giving up his choice of colours and picking them blindly, ‘It’s as if the body of colour matters more than the identity of particular colours’ (Aspen Art Museum, Mark Grotjahn, Aspen Art Press, 2012, p. 60). In each row the stripes of colour become thinner and thinner as they culminate towards their own climax. The result for Untitled (Three-Tiered Perspective) is the optical illusion of three-dimensional landscape receding towards a horizon through a variety of colour, space and direction.

15

Mark Grotjahn

Untitled (Three-Tiered Perspective)

1997
coloured pencil on paper
61 x 48.3 cm. (24 x 19 in.)
Signed and dated 'Mark Grotjahn 1997' on the reverse.

Estimate
£140,000 - 180,000 ‡

Sold for £170,500

Contact Specialist
Peter Sumner
Head of Contemporary Art Department
psumner@phillips.com
+44 207 318 4063

Contemporary Art Evening Sale

London 27 June 2013 7pm

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Rob Pruitt
Chinese Buffet
Estimate £30,000 - 50,000 ‡
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2
Kelley Walker
Untitled
Estimate £100,000 - 150,000 †
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3
Tauba Auerbach
Untitled (Fold) XV
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4
Ugo Rondinone
No. 209 DREISSIGSTERJUNIZWEITAUSENDUNDNULL
Estimate £70,000 - 90,000 ‡
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5
Ugo Rondinone
If There were Anywhere but Desert. Friday
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6
Cindy Sherman
Untitled #426
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7
Rudolf Stingel
Untitled (Bolego)
Estimate £600,000 - 800,000 ‡♠
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8
Cindy Sherman
Untitled Film Still #36
Estimate £60,000 - 80,000 ‡
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9
Glenn Brown
Oscillate Wildly (after ‘Autumnal Cannibalism’ 1936 by Salvador Dalí)
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10
Andy Warhol
Pontiac
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11
Anish Kapoor
Untitled
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12
Andy Warhol
Diamond Dust Shoes
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13
Andy Warhol
Skull
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14
Jean-Michel Basquiat
Three Pontificators
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15
Mark Grotjahn
Untitled (Three-Tiered Perspective)
Estimate £140,000 - 180,000 ‡
Sold for £170,500
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16
Jean-Michel Basquiat
Untitled
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17
Anish Kapoor
Turning the World Upside Down II
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18
Antony Gormley
SICK
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19
This lot is no longer available.
20
Andy Warhol
Electric Chairs
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21
George Condo
Smiling Smoker
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22
Marcel Broodthaers
Abbildung
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23
Oscar Murillo
Untitled
Estimate £20,000 - 30,000 ♠†
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24
Sterling Ruby
Alabaster SR10-7
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Sold for £110,500
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25
Jacob Kassay
Untitled
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26
Rashid Johnson
Cosmic Slop
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27
Marc Quinn
Separation of Body and Soul (Ultramarine)
Estimate £80,000 - 120,000 ‡♠
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Contemporary Art Evening Sale

London 27 June 2013 7pm

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Provenance

Exhibited

Literature

Catalogue Essay

15

Mark Grotjahn

Untitled (Three-Tiered Perspective)

Contemporary Art Evening Sale

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