Untitled (Full Color Butterfly Up the Middle White Sides 748)

Mark Grotjahn has established himself as one of the leading abstract painters of his generation. Known for his intricate and expressive works, the artist has taken our understanding of abstraction to new levels, as can be seen in this striking example from his prismatic Butterfly series. In this large-scale work, we see two sets of dynamic geometric bands that stretch vertically down at a slight angle, convening together to create a single focused area that narrows as it reaches the bottom. This kaleidoscopic composition of vivid colors springs from a focal point located just below the mid-point of the composition, bursting out in a wholly energetic and vibrant manner, yet artfully constrained by the borders of its shape. Rich shades of red, blue, green, and yellow, in varying tones, mingle but don’t mix, all clearly delineated in a dazzling explosion of lines. The detail that Grotjahn applies to each strip of color, expertly rendered in pencil, shows hints of an outline, or layered slivers of background between some bands, lending the work an air of depth more frequently associated with painting. The composition is true to the tradition of Grotjahn’s exceptional suite of butterfly paintings and drawings, where the shapes closely resemble butterfly wings, and the implied movement created by the artist’s skilled hand conveys the grace of the creature in flight. Executed in colored pencil, their smoothness and precision lend the work an air of refinement and delicacy unique to the medium. The expanse of white paper that serves as a background accentuates the concentrated pulse of color that springs from its center, and allows the shapes to breathe and reach out beyond the work’s borders.

The genesis of the Butterfly series arose from Grotjahn’s earlier tiered perspective paintings, where the artist took this concept of horizontal perspectives, and turned it on its side. What makes this series so revolutionary is the way it has introduced a new form of geometric modernism into contemporary art. “By upending the horizon line in these works to form vertical ‘butterflies’, Grothjahn’s paintings seem to float free of their perspectival grounding. In this way the paintings oscillate between geometric abstraction and spatial illusion” (H. Zuckerman Jacobson, “Disruption” in Mark Grotjahn, Aspen, 2012 p. 56). Building on traditions of one-point perspective that have been integral to image making since the Renaissance, he calls upon classical visual tropes, as well as the core principles of more recent movements like Russian Constructivism and Op Art. Indeed, the boldness of his lines, and the ability to create movement and composition with a few simple shapes, are a testament to the importance of the Butterfly works as part of a significant dialogue with the art of past and present. This experimentation with the traditions of formal rules is taken to its culmination in the year that the present work was created. Drawing from years of paintings and drawings, Untitled (Full Color Butterfly Up the Middle White Sides 748) showcases the core elements of this groundbreaking series, while condensing its geometric design into a narrow, intensely focused space, and leaving the rest of the page untouched, displaying the confidence of a true master in his field.

Throughout his career, Grotjahn has managed to straddle a singular balance between what appears as both precisely measured abstraction and a more intuitive mode of painterly expression. His practice has included the Butterfly works, as well as expressively painted faces, and three-dimensional masks, all of which possess a similar visceral spontaneity coupled with classical discipline. Based in California, first in the Bay Area, and then primarily in Los Angeles, he first gained recognition for a project called Sign Exchange. This involved him copying local shop signs, and trading his duplicates with the shop owners in exchange for the originals. This series served as a jumping off point for Grotjahn’s shift from conceptual ideas of perception to formal ones. Returning to an investigative process of shapes and color was a bold leap from the previous series, and one he noted in an interview on the occasion of an exhibition of the Butterfly works at the Portland Art Museum in 2010: “I started to think about why I got into art in the first place,” he explains. “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” (M. Grotjahn, quoted in A. Douglass, “Interview with Mark Grotjahn”, October 6, 2010, at http:/www.portlandart.net/ archives/2010/10/interview_with_11.html [accessed October 8, 2017]). This innate desire to build on a conceptual community-based practice and shift his own perspective ultimately led to a groundbreaking body of work, of which Untitled serves as a exceptional example of the artist’s journey, technique, and singular mode of expression.