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Lot Essay
A monumental and poetic work, elegantly rendered in triptych format, Mark Grotjahn’s Untitled (Solid Cream Butterfly Drawing in Three Parts DO NOT SEPARATE 836) is a sumptuous feast for the eyes. With its sweeping, magisterial scale and elegant monochromatic palette, the present triptych demonstrates the lengths to which Grotjahn has refined and expanded upon his celebrated Butterfly series that he began in 2001. In this, one of his largest Butterfly works to ever appear at auction, Grotjahn has infused the composition with billowing clouds of atmospheric color. This, combined with the razor-sharp lines of the butterfly’s “wings” that race toward an infinity point, elicits a strong hypnotic pull on the viewer. It exemplifies the artist’s unceasing investigation into the abstract capacity of one-point perspective, which is now subtly infused with color and the power of the artist’s mark.
“Grotjahn thus takes us back to the mysticism of pioneering abstractionists by a new and different route. His drawings cast a spell, reminding us that abstraction was once not only enigmatic but, literally, entrancing.” Donald Kuspit
In what has become his signature motif, Grotjahn uses perspective lines that recede toward a vanishing point to create his Butterfly series. This convention has been used by Western artists since the Renaissance to create the illusion of depth in a work of art. It also creates a rational sense of harmony and order that is pleasing to the eye. In the present work, Grotjahn divides each sheet into a set of two separate “wings,” where the perspectival lines fan outward toward the periphery of the sheet. At first glance, the composition appears perfectly symmetrical, with the lines arranged along a central axis. After prolonged looking, however, the viewer realizes that these perspectival lines do not neatly meet up at the middle. Rather, the meeting point is slightly skewed; the lines are not evenly spaced according to a mathematical ratio, but are instead the product of the artist’s clever technique.
In Untitled (Solid Cream Butterfly Drawing in Three Parts DO NOT SEPARATE 836), Grotjahn infuses the work with airy and ethereal passages of pure color. The color pencil that he has applied has almost been impregnated into the sheet itself, resulting in deep purplish-blue passages that hover, cloudlike, with a drama and gravitas unique to this series. It evokes the color of storm clouds that linger overhead, while traces of magenta in the right-most panel evokes the rosy tinge of the setting sun.
Grotjahn has applied his color carefully and subtly, so that absolutely no trace of the artist’s hand is visible. This stands in sharp contrast to the precise perspective lines and the pencil marks that dot the surface of the sheet. Like Turner’s smoky sunsets or Rothko’s enveloping fields of pure color, Grotjahn infuses the work with a certain mood that only certain artists working with certain colors can convey. “Their strong color hints at passion…” the art critic Donald Kuspit has written. “Grotjahn thus takes us back to the mysticism of pioneering abstractionists by a new and different route. His drawings cast a spell, reminding us that abstraction was once not only enigmatic but, literally, entrancing” (D. Kuspit, “Mark Grotjahn: Whitney Museum of American Art,” Artforum, Vol. 45, No. 5, January 2007, p. 253).
In this, one of his largest Butterfly works to ever appear at auction, Grotjahn has infused the composition with billowing clouds of atmospheric color. This, combined with the razor-sharp lines of the butterfly’s “wings” that race toward an infinity point, elicits a strong hypnotic pull on the viewer.
Indeed, the present work seems to wrestle with the very legacy of art history itself. Grotjahn has confronted the historical system of one-point perspective, a mathematical system used to convey a unified, cohesive whole. This is referenced, delineated, but then skewed and problematized. He celebrates the power of the artist’s mark in the countless pentimenti that dot and mar the sheet; this evokes the graffiti-like jottings of Cy Twombly whilst paying homage to the supremacy of the artist’s gesture in Abstract Expressionist paintings. So, too, does his sumptuous use of pure color, softly rendered as if to be only a lingering trace of past hues, evoke the sublime canvases of Mark Rothko and Barnett Newman’s zips. Grotjahn’s Butterfly series also engages with a broad spectrum of abstract art, including Op-Art, Minimalism, Constructivism and Futurism.
In this way, Grotjahn references all of art history in clever and ingenious ways, thereby laying out for himself a new path forward, one which engages with art history but is also resolutely his own. The curator Laura Hoptman perceived this trend as a wider aspect of contemporary artists working today. She describes it as “atemporality.” Rather than follow a prescribed path leading in a single direction, Contemporary artists can pick and choose from any genre in history to inform their practice. She writes, “Unlike a road with many mile markers and a double line down the middle enforcing a single direction of its lanes, atemporality allows us to imagine the cultural landscape as a ‘stream of endless recombination,’ into which Contemporary artists can dive from many different directions” (L. Hoptman, The Forever Now: Contemporary Painting in an Atemporal World, exh. cat., Museum of Modern Art, New York, 2014, p. 60).
Grotjahn’s Butterfly series, then, becomes a free-floating field that shifts and mutates before our eyes, coming in and out of step with art history and ultimately becoming something truly new. The artist’s individuality is continually reiterated in the lingering traces of his own hand that infuse the present work with a sense of vitality and aliveness. Indeed, Grotjahn allows the pentimenti of prior workings to remain an essential feature in the piece. Especially within the right-facing sheet, the series of jots, dashes and slightly erased lines are the tangible reminder of the artist himself and his role in making the work. These traces of Grotjahn’s working method stress the presence of the artist himself, and the supremacy of the artist’s mark.
“Grotjahn thus takes us back to the mysticism of pioneering abstractionists by a new and different route. His drawings cast a spell, reminding us that abstraction was once not only enigmatic but, literally, entrancing.” Donald Kuspit
In what has become his signature motif, Grotjahn uses perspective lines that recede toward a vanishing point to create his Butterfly series. This convention has been used by Western artists since the Renaissance to create the illusion of depth in a work of art. It also creates a rational sense of harmony and order that is pleasing to the eye. In the present work, Grotjahn divides each sheet into a set of two separate “wings,” where the perspectival lines fan outward toward the periphery of the sheet. At first glance, the composition appears perfectly symmetrical, with the lines arranged along a central axis. After prolonged looking, however, the viewer realizes that these perspectival lines do not neatly meet up at the middle. Rather, the meeting point is slightly skewed; the lines are not evenly spaced according to a mathematical ratio, but are instead the product of the artist’s clever technique.
In Untitled (Solid Cream Butterfly Drawing in Three Parts DO NOT SEPARATE 836), Grotjahn infuses the work with airy and ethereal passages of pure color. The color pencil that he has applied has almost been impregnated into the sheet itself, resulting in deep purplish-blue passages that hover, cloudlike, with a drama and gravitas unique to this series. It evokes the color of storm clouds that linger overhead, while traces of magenta in the right-most panel evokes the rosy tinge of the setting sun.
Grotjahn has applied his color carefully and subtly, so that absolutely no trace of the artist’s hand is visible. This stands in sharp contrast to the precise perspective lines and the pencil marks that dot the surface of the sheet. Like Turner’s smoky sunsets or Rothko’s enveloping fields of pure color, Grotjahn infuses the work with a certain mood that only certain artists working with certain colors can convey. “Their strong color hints at passion…” the art critic Donald Kuspit has written. “Grotjahn thus takes us back to the mysticism of pioneering abstractionists by a new and different route. His drawings cast a spell, reminding us that abstraction was once not only enigmatic but, literally, entrancing” (D. Kuspit, “Mark Grotjahn: Whitney Museum of American Art,” Artforum, Vol. 45, No. 5, January 2007, p. 253).
In this, one of his largest Butterfly works to ever appear at auction, Grotjahn has infused the composition with billowing clouds of atmospheric color. This, combined with the razor-sharp lines of the butterfly’s “wings” that race toward an infinity point, elicits a strong hypnotic pull on the viewer.
Indeed, the present work seems to wrestle with the very legacy of art history itself. Grotjahn has confronted the historical system of one-point perspective, a mathematical system used to convey a unified, cohesive whole. This is referenced, delineated, but then skewed and problematized. He celebrates the power of the artist’s mark in the countless pentimenti that dot and mar the sheet; this evokes the graffiti-like jottings of Cy Twombly whilst paying homage to the supremacy of the artist’s gesture in Abstract Expressionist paintings. So, too, does his sumptuous use of pure color, softly rendered as if to be only a lingering trace of past hues, evoke the sublime canvases of Mark Rothko and Barnett Newman’s zips. Grotjahn’s Butterfly series also engages with a broad spectrum of abstract art, including Op-Art, Minimalism, Constructivism and Futurism.
In this way, Grotjahn references all of art history in clever and ingenious ways, thereby laying out for himself a new path forward, one which engages with art history but is also resolutely his own. The curator Laura Hoptman perceived this trend as a wider aspect of contemporary artists working today. She describes it as “atemporality.” Rather than follow a prescribed path leading in a single direction, Contemporary artists can pick and choose from any genre in history to inform their practice. She writes, “Unlike a road with many mile markers and a double line down the middle enforcing a single direction of its lanes, atemporality allows us to imagine the cultural landscape as a ‘stream of endless recombination,’ into which Contemporary artists can dive from many different directions” (L. Hoptman, The Forever Now: Contemporary Painting in an Atemporal World, exh. cat., Museum of Modern Art, New York, 2014, p. 60).
Grotjahn’s Butterfly series, then, becomes a free-floating field that shifts and mutates before our eyes, coming in and out of step with art history and ultimately becoming something truly new. The artist’s individuality is continually reiterated in the lingering traces of his own hand that infuse the present work with a sense of vitality and aliveness. Indeed, Grotjahn allows the pentimenti of prior workings to remain an essential feature in the piece. Especially within the right-facing sheet, the series of jots, dashes and slightly erased lines are the tangible reminder of the artist himself and his role in making the work. These traces of Grotjahn’s working method stress the presence of the artist himself, and the supremacy of the artist’s mark.