“ Maybe somehow it is important for me to have structures to keep myself interested in making a work.” MARK GROTJAHN

Powerful, dynamic and complex, Los Angeles based artist Mark Grotjahn’s celebrated butterfly paintings are invigorating works that vibrate with fresh intensity and yet resonate with the irrefutable presence of Pop art and Minimalist predecessors. Derived from the artist’s fascination with signs and retro-graphics, the butterfly paintings are focused perspectival investigations into dual and multiple vanishing points, techniques used since the Renaissance to create an illusion of depth and volume on a two dimensional surface. The present lot, Untitled (Orange Butterfly Over Green), 2003, conflates nature and culture into sumptuous amalgamation of polished design and bursts of expression. Characterized by radiating sequences of large parallel lines executed in thick red-orange impasto, the illusion of perspective is elegantly suggested by the butterfly form.

Over the course of nearly two decades, Grotjahn has excited our awareness of perspective, geometry, and spatial color relationships. His bi-winged drawings and paintings, rendered in painstakingly vibrant arrays of color or in luminous monochromatic hues, draws our eyes directly into their centres, where a central vertical line bends and thickens as a result of illusion. The measured proximity of Grotjahn’s design pulsates from its two central axes, yielding two infinite and opposite horizons—their vanishing points are elusive. Grotjahn’s Untitled (Orange Butterfly Over Green), 2003, is as much a perpetual search for the viewer as it is a wonderful display of dazzling colour. He inspires us to both scrutinize and be transfixed by his art.

Grotjahn further pushes boundaries through the transformation of nature into conceptual abstraction- his purposefully asymmetrical bands stemming from mismatched vanishing points. While his eponymous works convey the marvelous hues of outstretched butterfly wings, here the artist’s carefully chosen colors evoke the interior of a succulent blood-orange, dissected in two, enticing the viewer’s gaze. Indeed, like nature, Grotjahn’s paintings possess an off-kilter quality, demonstrated in the stretching and receding lines and forms, each creating a separate deception of space, convoluting and disorienting the viewer’s sense of space. This dramatic perspectival tension,coupled with the intentionally steady accumulation of opaque layers of heavily textured paint is Grotjahn’s contemporary interpretation and affirmation of canonical figures such as Barnett Newman, Roy Lichtenstein and Frank Stella.

With his monumental stripes, Grotjahn successfully links the appearance of playfulness in his practice to the blissful intensity of Roy Lichtenstein’s sun series. While Lichtenstein produced scenic and glorious sunsets and sunrises, framed by white clouds and bright skies, Grotjahn, brings the viewer to the centre most of the sunburst, synergizing a Pop explosion. Of course, one can equally interpret the presence of colour field painting in the vertical bands that dissect the centre and frame each side ofUntitled (Orange Butterfly Over Green). The stoic gravity of Barnett Newman’s Who’s Afraid of Red, Yellow and Blue II, 1967, transfixes the viewer’s gaze, commanding our attention with its monumental beams red, lined with sparks of yellow and simultaneously divided and grounded with blue. In both Grotjahn and Newman the movement places less emphasis on gesture, brushstrokes and action in favour of an overall emphasis on consistency of form and process rather than gesture and brushstroke. Here action does not come from the gesture of painting but the performative action of the colored surface. In color field painting, as in Frank Stella’s geometrically compartmentalized painterliness, colour becomes context and the result yields nothing short of elegant abstraction on a fundamentally human scale.


Grotjahn’s butterfly paintings represent an organically evolving motif in the artist’s oeuvre, highly formalized experimentations in the possibilities afforded by the almost monochromatic two-dimensional picture plane highlighted by exercises in frontality versus linear perspective. Here, a composition of intricate, skewed angles and radiant, yet subtle, gradations of colour allude to the multiple narratives coursing through the history of modernist painting, from the utopian vision of Russian Constructivism to the hallucinatory images of Op Art. It is precisely for this reason that the artist’s signature imagery, sublimely sensory, resonates so powerfully. In Grotjahn’s paintings, particularly the present lot, we find our perception transformed by pure optical sensation into motive power, quiet seductiveness, and highly emotional energy.

Carefully articulating his own iconography—juxtaposing red, orange and hints of green peeking along the lower edge of the canvas, Untitled (Orange Butterfly Over Green) is beautifully orchestrated; revealing the rich details of the artist’s hand, evidenced in the heavy lines of lustrous oil paint. The result is a mesmerizing starburst that radiates from two independent centres ”emanate[ing] an otherworldly light… his use of the butterfly form turns them into a cruciform structure, suggesting, in a literal versus metaphoric way, that God is present in the details.”(B. Goodbody. “Art in Review; Mark Grotjahn—Blue Paintings, Light to Dark, One through Ten”, New York Times, February 16, 2007.