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拍品專文
Alluring yet confrontational, Untitled (Into and through the Jungle Tiger Eye Face 45.97) radiates with an ecstatic energy that pulsates through its space, channeled by the work’s vibrant linear networks. A fantastic work from Mark Grotjahn’s acclaimed Face Paintings, here the artist amalgamates both abstract and figurative painterly traditions into a singular tableau. Absorbing the teachings of Picasso and Matisse alongside those of Pollock and Richter, the almost primal elegance of this work articulates the full course of twentieth-century Western art history from the vaunted position of our current century, severing the formal boundaries between abstraction and representation to produce a new aesthetic code eagerly embraced by prestigious institutions: examples of Grotjahn’s Face Paintings may be found at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, Tate, London, the Hammer Museum, and The Broad Museum.
Grotjahn imbues Untitled with a series of dense lines that emerge from the central axis, forming a cuspidate V-shape. The work evokes Grotjahn’s mastery over materials as thick layers of oil paint are sculpted by the artist with a palette knife into a mosaic of color in which bright azures and yellows peak through the predominant palette of burnt oranges, darkened reds, and somber browns and blacks. The interplay of these myriad tones achieves an impressive unanimity across the canvas’s animated surface, heightening the tableau’s rich texture established by the layered impasto and the underlying corrugated cardboard. Six decades ago, Josef Albers heralded his discovery that “color is the most relative medium in art…its greatest excitement lies beyond rules and canons” (J. Albers, Interaction of Color, Yale University Press, 1963, pg. 65). Grotjahn thoroughly embraces color’s inherent ambiguity, as the critic Robert Storr eloquently describes, with colors that “traverse, tailgate, and smear into each other, resulting in a constant chromatic cackle as complementary and secondary contrasts spark and flare like chain reaction fireworks” (R. Storr, “LA Push-Pull/Po-Mo-Stop-Go”, in Mark Grotjahn, exh. cat., Gagosian Gallery, London, 2009, p. 7). The intricate color relationships provide a more variegated and expansive update to Alber’s experimentations, Grotjahn’s work reveling in both color and texture.
Looking closely at the work’s surface, the paint itself ascends into a central motif of the work, bearing the same import as the ambiguous face. Viscous curlicues of oil and pigment encrust the canvas, casting shadows that subtly play with the work’s color effects. The refined physicality of the work emphasizes the artistic process, favoring the technical over the theoretical to insist upon a raw tactility. Untitled contains the same density of visual information as Vermeer at his most elegant or Pollock at his most chaotic; the work gifts uninterrupted study with undiminished yields, new forms and relationships always waiting to be discovered and explored.
In the present work, this mask-like face slowly emerges from underneath the abstraction, most heavily indicated in the eye-like ellipse in the center-right of the composition. Once spotted, this animating element functions as a fulcrum to transform the thick lower-most lines into an angular jaw, while the black, yellow, and green stripes take up the semblance of a tiger’s stripes, as alluded to in the title. The tiger-like face thus emerges out of the painting’s sculptural topography, penetrating the work’s surface and shattering its presumed abstraction. Commenting on his working practice with the Face Paintings series, Grotjahn said: I have an idea as to what sort of face is going to happen when I do a Face Painting, but I don’t exactly know what color it will take, or how many eyes it’s going to have, whereas the Butterflies are fairly planned out” (M. Grotjahn, quoted in interview with J. Tumlir, “Big Nose Baby and the Moose”, in Flash Art, No. 252, January-February 2007, p. 84). These forms have an affinity with the primitivism of Matisse and Picasso, yet rather than appropriating West African art motifs as the modernists had done, Grotjahn’s interest in the motif is in its continued generative potential across art movements. As Kate Sutton has commented, “If there is anything truly “primal” here, it is the artist’s intuition, his ability to compound accumulations of paint into aesthetically compelling arrangements.” (K. Sutton, “Mark Grotjahn, Anton Kern Gallery,” in Artforum, 2011, published online https://www.artforum.com/events/mark-grotjahn-2-190456/).
This painting is emblematic of Grotjahn’s singular ability to present painting as a medium where an image is conjured from pigment. The work’s capacity to evoke both the figurative and abstract, the conceptual and the emotive, all the time synthesizing disparate artistic movements lays a forceful claim for painting’s continued viability and revolutionary potential in the twenty-first century. A striking work from one of the best contemporary painters, Untitled presents an alluring vision of painting’s possibilities.
Grotjahn imbues Untitled with a series of dense lines that emerge from the central axis, forming a cuspidate V-shape. The work evokes Grotjahn’s mastery over materials as thick layers of oil paint are sculpted by the artist with a palette knife into a mosaic of color in which bright azures and yellows peak through the predominant palette of burnt oranges, darkened reds, and somber browns and blacks. The interplay of these myriad tones achieves an impressive unanimity across the canvas’s animated surface, heightening the tableau’s rich texture established by the layered impasto and the underlying corrugated cardboard. Six decades ago, Josef Albers heralded his discovery that “color is the most relative medium in art…its greatest excitement lies beyond rules and canons” (J. Albers, Interaction of Color, Yale University Press, 1963, pg. 65). Grotjahn thoroughly embraces color’s inherent ambiguity, as the critic Robert Storr eloquently describes, with colors that “traverse, tailgate, and smear into each other, resulting in a constant chromatic cackle as complementary and secondary contrasts spark and flare like chain reaction fireworks” (R. Storr, “LA Push-Pull/Po-Mo-Stop-Go”, in Mark Grotjahn, exh. cat., Gagosian Gallery, London, 2009, p. 7). The intricate color relationships provide a more variegated and expansive update to Alber’s experimentations, Grotjahn’s work reveling in both color and texture.
Looking closely at the work’s surface, the paint itself ascends into a central motif of the work, bearing the same import as the ambiguous face. Viscous curlicues of oil and pigment encrust the canvas, casting shadows that subtly play with the work’s color effects. The refined physicality of the work emphasizes the artistic process, favoring the technical over the theoretical to insist upon a raw tactility. Untitled contains the same density of visual information as Vermeer at his most elegant or Pollock at his most chaotic; the work gifts uninterrupted study with undiminished yields, new forms and relationships always waiting to be discovered and explored.
In the present work, this mask-like face slowly emerges from underneath the abstraction, most heavily indicated in the eye-like ellipse in the center-right of the composition. Once spotted, this animating element functions as a fulcrum to transform the thick lower-most lines into an angular jaw, while the black, yellow, and green stripes take up the semblance of a tiger’s stripes, as alluded to in the title. The tiger-like face thus emerges out of the painting’s sculptural topography, penetrating the work’s surface and shattering its presumed abstraction. Commenting on his working practice with the Face Paintings series, Grotjahn said: I have an idea as to what sort of face is going to happen when I do a Face Painting, but I don’t exactly know what color it will take, or how many eyes it’s going to have, whereas the Butterflies are fairly planned out” (M. Grotjahn, quoted in interview with J. Tumlir, “Big Nose Baby and the Moose”, in Flash Art, No. 252, January-February 2007, p. 84). These forms have an affinity with the primitivism of Matisse and Picasso, yet rather than appropriating West African art motifs as the modernists had done, Grotjahn’s interest in the motif is in its continued generative potential across art movements. As Kate Sutton has commented, “If there is anything truly “primal” here, it is the artist’s intuition, his ability to compound accumulations of paint into aesthetically compelling arrangements.” (K. Sutton, “Mark Grotjahn, Anton Kern Gallery,” in Artforum, 2011, published online https://www.artforum.com/events/mark-grotjahn-2-190456/).
This painting is emblematic of Grotjahn’s singular ability to present painting as a medium where an image is conjured from pigment. The work’s capacity to evoke both the figurative and abstract, the conceptual and the emotive, all the time synthesizing disparate artistic movements lays a forceful claim for painting’s continued viability and revolutionary potential in the twenty-first century. A striking work from one of the best contemporary painters, Untitled presents an alluring vision of painting’s possibilities.